Don’t Look Behind You

didn’t mind.
    The Des Moines Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored Kandy, and the Wind Drift Restaurant sponsored Barbara. They both were chosen among the twelve finalists.
    Kandy Kay Hansen won. It was a serious coup d’état for Bob. Wearing a white tuxedo, he stood proudly next to his daughter while photographers took their picture, knowing that they would be on the front page of the local weekly, the
Des Moines News
.
    Bob Hansen had traveled far from the boy who had to wear manure-stained pants to school. He didn’t give a second thought to whoever had fallen in his path along the way. Bob never had pangs of conscience that anyone could see.
    Kandy was soon caught up in the whirl of the Miss Washington competition. Preparing for the state pageant on June 22 to 24, 1978, she had handlers and chaperones and they watched her closely. She had never had chaperones before but she did what they told her to do. She stayed away from her married lover, alcohol, and marijuana. For a time, she almost had mother figures, although it was far too late by then.
    If she could only win Miss Washington, Kandy would be on her way to Atlantic City and the Miss America pageant in September. She was pretty enough and she certainly had talent enough to win, and her father was pushing hard and spending freely to help her surpass all the other young women.
    “She wanted to be Miss Washington
so much
,” Barbara says. “It meant everything to her.”
    In the end, Kandy Kay Hansen came in as third runner-up to Miss Washington. It was difficult to tell who wasmore disappointed, Kandy or Bob. She was his shining star and she had failed him. He let her know that, seeing, as always, only his own side of it.
    With her dream lost, Kandy Hansen changed. She would be twenty in four months, and it seemed that she had aimed for—and failed to achieve—the most important goal she would ever have. She didn’t want to go to college, and she didn’t want to take another boring job. She was depressed, and the future seemed to hold no hope for her.
    It was 1978, and it wasn’t long before Kandy was back with the park ranger, back on marijuana, and probably on stronger drugs. She dated several men. Barbara saw the bruises and the cuts on Kandy’s lips; her lovers were abusers—just like her father had been with her mother.
    Kandy grew skilled at applying makeup to cover her battle scars, but it broke Barbara Kuehne’s heart to see how men had physically hurt her. Their paths were diverging as Kandy and Barbara’s lifestyles were no longer in sync. Barb wanted to have a husband and a family, and Kandy wasn’t sure what she wanted. As much as they tried to pretend things were still the same between them, they both knew they weren’t.
    Barb Kuehne wasn’t the only one who was angry at men who hurt Kandy. There was one man Kandy tried in vain to break up with; he wouldn’t let her go and he trailed her everywhere she went. She finally told her father that she was afraid of what the guy might do to her.
    Bob laughed later when he told his friend Marv Milosevich that he had instructed Kandy to invite the stalkerinto her apartment, and told her that he would handle things from there.
    Kandy did let the obsessive ex-boyfriend into her apartment. When the unwanted suitor walked into the dark apartment, Bob was waiting—with an iron plumbing pipe. He swung it as hard as he could against the man’s head.
    “What happened to him?” Marv asked.
    “Let’s just say that she won’t have to worry about him ever again,” Bob said grimly.
    He wouldn’t reveal whether the man was dead or alive, but Marv suspected the former.
    Barb was engaged to be married a year or so after graduation, and she asked Kandy to be her maid of honor.
    “She said she would,” Barb remembers, “but she couldn’t seem to get it together enough to order her gown, or try it on. She always had something else to do, or I couldn’t find her. In the end, I knew I had to leave her out of my wedding.”
    But Kandy did come to her longtime best friend’s wedding.
    “She came with the park ranger, even though he was still married,” Barbara remembers sadly. “She was making bad choices.”
    Bob soon moved Kandy into one of the other houses he owned in Des Moines. It was only a few blocks north of the brown house behind the Willows. It was, in fact, the house he and Joann had lived in when they were first married. One or another member of his family lived in it over the