Don’t Look Behind You

Hansen children wore clothes that were neat and clean, their hair was cut, and no one could pick them out as children who were basically taking care of themselves. Nick and my daughter, Leslie, were in the same kindergarten class, and years later Ty and my son, Andy, were friends in junior high school and played baseball together.
    Oddly, perhaps, none of my five children recall Kandy Kay. That may be because the Hansen children attended another elementary school in the Highline school district. Students whose addresses fell north of the Kent DesMoines Road could choose between Des Moines Elementary and Parkside. All three of the Hansen kids chose Parkside, although they would meet up again with their friends from Rilda Moses’s kindergarten when everybody went to Pacific Junior High School.
    Kandy Kay was obviously her father’s favorite, and he let her do what she wanted.
    In 1967 Barbara Snyder (née Kuehne) moved to Des Moines with her family from their former home in Cleveland. On her first day at Parkside School, her third grade teacher asked for volunteers who would show “the new girl” around the school. Kandy Kay Hansen raised her hand immediately, and that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
    “Kandy was so good to me,” Barbara Kuehne Snyder recalls more than forty years later. “I missed Cleveland and my friends there, but I soon felt at home in Des Moines.”
    Barbara spent a lot of time in the brown house on Marine View Drive. Bob allowed his children to bring their friends home after school and on weekends and holidays. He himself was often working, but he laid down rules that they all had to follow.
    Barb Snyder remembers that all of the Hansen children were very talented. “Kandy played the saxophone and I played the clarinet. Nick was a musical genius—a genius at almost everything, although he didn’t spend much time with us.
    “We had a band for a while,” Barb said. “Kandy, Ty, me, and Greg Hardman.”
    Nick Hansen wasn’t a member of their band; he got together with his own group of friends who enjoyed music.
    Nick played all the woodwind instruments—clarinet, saxophone, flute, and bassoon. His prime musical skill, however, was as an arranger. When he was in sixth grade, he did his first arrangements for the school band, as he would for the bands of every school he attended.
    “My dad really didn’t want me to be a musician,” Nick says. “When I wanted to go to Kent-Meridian High School—which was out of our school district—he didn’t approve. But he was finally convinced when my teachers said that was where the best music curriculum was. They also had a good math program.”
    Kent-Meridian High School was more than a dozen miles from where Nick lived in Des Moines, and he rode his bicycle there and back every day, rain, snow, or shine. Later, he was able to find a bus route where he could get off and walk several miles to get home.
    But Nick Hansen spent as little time at home as possible. He stayed after school in Kent often, or he went to his friends’ homes to play music. Alan Hall’s, Todd Froy’s, and Jeff Barclay’s parents all welcomed Nick and he often stayed for supper or overnight.
    Nick knew that he was something of a disappointment to his father. “He pushed me into playing baseball, but I hated it and I wasn’t any good at sports.”
    “It’s kind of difficult to explain our relationships,” Ty says. “Nick went to a different high school than Kandy and I did. He wanted to take advantage of the advanced science, math, and music courses offered there. In a way,it was always the three of us against my dad—just to survive. But when it came down to it, it was every man for himself. Nick just stayed out of Dad’s way, Kandy Kay was his favorite, and, as I said, I got the brunt of his fists.”
    Of them all, Ty, who was not yet two when Joann disappeared, was the “target child.” He was the one who irritated his father more than the other two. Sometimes he and Nick wondered if Bob Hansen really
was
Ty’s biological father because he singled Ty out for the very worst physical punishment. Maybe their mother had been starved enough for love that she had been with another man.
    That was really just conjecture because Ty had Bob’s height, his chin, and his physical prowess. And Joann Hansen had been too panicked by her husband to do anything but simply try to survive.
    “Dad didn’t like Ty at all,” Nick says. “He wasn’t wanted. I