Don’t Look Behind You

Blood sports. He often returned from his hunting trips on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains with the still-bleeding bodies of the animals he’d shot roped to his truck fenders.
    Everything living was eventually lined up in Bob’s gun sights. His photo albums include scores of shots of Bob Hansen and the things he killed: deer, wolves, elk, bald eagles, strings of mammoth fish.
    One time, Bob organized a hunting trip to Montana with nine of the men he knew, including Marv Milosevich.
    “We went to the Silver Creek Campground,” Milosevich recalls, “and the fishing was great, but after five days, I think every guy there hated him. Bob had to control
everything
! He planned the menus, cooked the food, or told the guy cooking how to do it, decided when we’d eat, when and where we would fish—
everything
!”
    None of the nine—except for Marv—ever fished with Bob Hansen again.
    “I went fishing with him but I had to keep him at arm’s length,” Marv said with a grin. “I insisted on taking two boats. We’d keep in touch by radio or walkie-talkies, but we weren’t on the same boat.”
    Hansen never questioned why the man he considered to be his best friend wouldn’t spend even a few hours alone with him. Marv had had enough of Bob’s controlling nature, but he still liked Bob and felt obligated to him.

Chapter Four
A SMALL-TOWN MYSTERY
    It’s very difficult for me to believe that even though we lived in the same town, it took decades before I learned about Joann Hansen’s disappearance. And then suddenly information about her vanishing seemed to come at me from every direction during the same time period.
    I was approached by both Ty Hansen, Joann’s youngest son, and Kathleen Huget. They didn’t know each other—they had never even met.
I
didn’t know that Ty had gone to school with my older son, Andy, and had played baseball with him. Nor did I know that my other children had been acquainted with the three Hansen children.
    By the time I finally heard of the tragedy, which had occurred the year before we moved to Des Moines, almost five decades had passed. I found myself feeling guilty and regretful that I hadn’t been aware of it. With my background as a police officer and a welfare caseworker, I know I would have found some way to help Joann’s children. Our lives crisscrossed so often in the intervening years that it seems impossible I
didn’t
know them.
    In the early 1940s, my in-laws purchased a beach shack in Des Moines for $700. When they retired to Southern California in 1963, my then-husband, Bill Rule, wanted to go back to the small town where he grew up. Even though that little structure had been remodeled over the years, our house wasn’t exactly weatherproof. It was the first solid object windstorms blowing northeast over Puget Sound would hit. The walls were still stuffed with old newspapers for insulation, and in the winter the wind blew through a hundred cracks, making the windows facing the sound rattle. Indeed, there were even a few times when the single-pane glass blew out and our whole living room was left in shambles.
    When Bill and I and our three older children moved in, I was pregnant with my youngest son, Mike. It was summer and we all loved to roam the beach below the sandbank and across the street from our house.
    Des Moines had only 4,500 residents in 1963; the beach, a Covenant Church camp, and a number of church-sponsored retirement homes were the main attractions. Main Street was about four blocks long, with a supermarket on either end and a friendly, small grocery store in between. It was to be expected that we soon knew many of the people who lived in Des Moines, and most of the mysteries, folklore, ghosts, and unexplained happenings in town.
    And there were many.
    Sixth Avenue was haunted. It may still be, for all I know. Through the years, tragedy stalked the residents of Sixth Avenue. At the north end of the street, a hundredyears ago, a minister named Daddy Draper once oversaw an orphanage in an aged structure. Its paint had long since worn off. Over the years, a number of motley tenants moved in and out of the building. Moving toward the south end, almost every home had suffered a tragedy. Old-timers could list more than a dozen heartrending events.
    There was one home where my daughter Leslie wouldn’t babysit after her first night there. When the sun went down, anyone in the house—including myself—could hear what clearly seemed to be the