Empty Promises

explained he couldn’t trust her and had to tie her hands. Then he led her to her husband’s body.
    “Don’t look. You wouldn’t want to see him,” he warned, leaving her tied a short distance away. He returned with Hank’s watch. “Now,” he ordered. “You’re not allowed to cry. I’m going to tell you a story. You’ll have your time to cry, but I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
    He washed any residual blood off her hands with a bottle of water and then took a swig of water as he began his story.
    “You and your husband were dumb to believe I was a logger who worked up here.You can see my truck’s from Nebraska. I’ve killed five or six people, and I’m wanted for murder in several states. My name is Kent, not Tom, and I’m a hit man for the Organization, but I’ve killed one man too many, and now they’re after me. I had to kill your husband because I wanted to take you into the mountains to live with me. I need companionship.
    “If they come after us, you are to run in one direction and I’ll run in another so I’m the one who’ll be killed.”
    He explained that he had been watching her and thought she was fit enough to make a mountain woman. She stared at him, dumbfounded. He was like someone from another planet to her. She could barely believe what he was telling her. “Now, now,” Tom said, “you can cry.”
    Finally, Robin let her sobs out, crying brokenheartedly. When she was empty of tears, she tried everything she could think of to convince him that he didn’t want her. She told him she was really a city girl who couldn’t last on the mountain trails. She told him she was sick; she would be a drag on him. She even told him she was a “slut who gets it on with everyone,” hoping this would turn him off and make him afraid she might infect him with something. But he only kept smiling that fixed grin. “I was so afraid to be up there with him,” she wrote. “He tried to comfort me and hug me, but I wouldn’t let him.”
    Then Tom instructed her to gather her belongings and some food and follow him. He allowed her to take her Bible. She pleaded with him to let her leave a note for her family, but he said they couldn’t leave a trail.
    Laden down, they headed into the woods. When the trees closed off behind them Tom had her change into army pants so that she would be camouflaged from the “hit men who are after us.” She went into the bushes to hide herself from him as she changed. Strangely, Tom dumped articles along the trail as they went. At first, she thought he was being careless, but then, when he cut through the brush, she knew he was leaving a false trail. They went down a steep rocky bank to the river’s edge, and headed upriver. “If you see an airplane or a helicopter, duck,” he warned, “that will mean they’ve found us.”
    Robin wrote, “He was bossy and always telling me to hurry. He told me only to step on rocks—never mud, sand, moss, or bark or anything else that would leave footprints. He said we were going way over to the other side of the mountain, and if anyone did come across us, I was to keep quiet and pose as his wife.”
    Robin recalled that a small plane flew overhead and they’d hidden. Then they cut over to the smaller tributary of the river. She asked Tom if they had brought her grandmother or their friend along, would he have killed them too? He said, “Yes, but I don’t really like killing. We do it only if we have a good reason.”
    He didn’t look like a hired assassin, she thought; he was slightly built and his swaggering seemed to be an act, but he certainly talked like a member of a sinister organization. And he had the cruelest eyes she’d ever seen, deep-set and full of hate. After hours of crashing through the brush, Tom told her they could take a rest. He lay on the sleeping bag while she went into the water to cool off.
    “I went in the water in my bikini with my back to him. I wasn’t even thinking of sex, so I figured he wasn’t either. All of a sudden, I felt him staring at me. He ordered me to come over to him. I got out of the water with my hair over my cleavage, and then he told me to take my top off. I begged him to wait a few days. I said, ‘You’ve just murdered my husband. Please don’t do this.’ ”
    Tom took the knife from his belt and put it on the ground next to him, and said, “Remember what I told you?”
    She took off her top, but left her long black hair covering her nakedness.
    “Now take