Don’t Look Behind You

anguished sound of a woman weeping, her cries spreading outside farther and farther the darker it got. More than that, unseen hands seemed to push the mantel away from the fireplace in the home. Our dogs refused to go in the crawl space beneath the house, and, oddly, we heard glass jars rolling down there—even when there was no room for that to happen.
    Across the street, a psychotic son—whose “episodes” invariably happened during the winter holidays—killed his mother and then cut her head off before setting fire to their house; the daughter of the family next door was shot and left a quadriplegic; another family close by had been in a horrible accident that killed their teenage son and crippled them; and one could only guess at some of the tragedies that had brought orphans to Daddy Draper’s.
    The odd couple who lived in a ramshackle house on the corner next to where the weeping woman cried kept old Christmas trees and a dead dog on their front porch. And when they shopped at one of the supermarkets, they literally had a layer of dust on them—even on their hair and clothing. All of us gave them a wide berth in the checkout line.
    There were true stories of several people who had drowned in the sound at the southern end of Sixth, including a scrawny fisherman who gave a ride in his rowboat to an immensely fat woman. Her weight caused the boat to tip. While her fat insulated her from the cold waters,
he
perished from hypothermia. She caught pneumonia but she survived.
    Below our house, Cliff Avenue, on the edge of the sound, had been the burial ground for Native Americans in the nineteenth century, along with their canoes, intricately woven baskets, blue beads, and other treasures. A lot of people believed that they, too, haunted Des Moines after their graves were disturbed. (My former father-in-law, the Methodist preacher’s son, was one of the bad boys who saved souvenirs. As an adult, he gave them to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.)
    Now Des Moines has dozens of expensive condos along the beach, and I doubt that new residents have any idea about the old folktales.
    Near where Joann and Bob Hansen lived in their first home—on Eighth Street two blocks east—there was a fatal fire on Christmas Eve, and a triple murder, each of them on a separate Christmas.
    One had to be a student of local history and immensely curious—as I was, and am—to know of all these events. But, as much as I search my memory, to the best of my knowledge I never met either Bob or Joann Hansen, although I’m sure we must have passed each other in the supermarkets, at Little League games, or at school events.
    And despite my interest in local history, I had never heard of their story until Kathleen Huget and Ty Hansencontacted me within weeks of each other. And independently, some of Ty’s friends also got in touch with me. This was in the late summer of 2010, and what they wanted to tell me about had happened
forty-eight years
earlier!
    As a stack of albums, legal papers, narratives written by friends, and newspaper clippings were delivered to me, I was startled to see school photos identical to some I have saved in my children’s scrapbooks. In one photo of Mrs. Rilda Moses’s private kindergarten, my younger daughter, Leslie, is sitting in the front row, wearing the red corduroy and paper-doll patterned dress I sewed for her back when we were poor and couldn’t afford to shop at department stores.
    I recognized several of her friends in the 1964 group photo, but Joann and Bob Hansen’s first child, Nick, was in the back row; I never knew Nick.

Chapter Five
A DOOMED MARRIAGE
    Joann gave birth to Nick Hansen at Auburn General Hospital on November 7, 1957. He weighed six pounds, ten and a half ounces, and he had dark hair like his mother. Someone pasted the hospital card that identified his bassinet in the newborn ward into the same album with his father’s earliest photographs. It was probably Joann; she loved being a mother, and she adored Nick as she did her older son, Bobby.
    If Joann had any reason to regret her relationship with Bob Hansen, there was no way she could change the direction her life was headed. For three years in a row, like clockwork, she became pregnant each February. She had her daughter, Kandy Kay, in November 1958, and her youngest son, Ty, in November 1959.
    She loved her children and she gloried in being a mother. But by this time if Joann Hansen could have escaped from her