Don’t Look Behind You
wedding, but they had both been naive about how they could work out the huge truth that divided them.
They were divorced, but they have remained friends and they share the care of Robyn and Terri.
Ty, too, feels that his marriage was responsible for a positive change in his world, even though they would eventually divorce.
“Brigette and Sylvie saved my life,” Ty says. “They meant so much to me, and so did my wife, Jill.* I got clean and sober for them, and as they grew older, I wanted to tell my daughters about my family. The problem was that I didn’t
know
that much about my family. Uncle Ken and his wife, Lorene, were gone, and I knew nothing about any relatives my mother might have had.”
Ty decided to start with the court records on his parents’ divorce—a divorce then thirty-odd years in the past. Ty himself was about thirty-three when he went to King County to ask about the divorce records.
He was shocked at what he found there. He’d never known about the physical abuse his mother had endured at his father’s hands. But it was easy for Ty to believe—after the bruises, broken bones, and broken teeth he had suffered from Bob’s punishments.
All he’d ever heard was that his mother hadn’t wanted any of her children, that she had simply walked away from them without a backward glance. The woman he was reading about in the dusty divorce file sounded far different from the way his father had always characterized Joann.
The civil deputy at the counter evidently knew about the disappearance of Joann Hansen. He spoke confidentially to Ty.
“He told me that no one had ever found her, but then he said he had always believed my father had murdered my mother.”
That revelation stunned Ty Hansen. He hadn’t realized that many of the old-timers in the sheriff’s department had long felt that his mother was a homicide victim; they just hadn’t had any evidence to go on back in the day when no body meant no murder as far as the law and evidence went.
He knew his mother had vanished in August 1962. Ty wondered how many more people might still be around who would share information with him. Scarcely hoping that he could find his mother’s divorce attorney—DuncanBonjorni—Ty thumbed through south King County phone books to see if Bonjorni was listed. Bonjorni might not even be alive, Ty thought, figuring that the attorney would probably be in his late sixties or seventies.
Bonjorni was alive, and quite willing to talk with Ty Hansen.
Ty took his daughter Brigette with him when he went to Bonjorni’s law offices. “She took her first step there,” he remembers. “In the rain at the parking lot, and she was so small. My wife and I were so blown away to see her walk!”
Bonjorni said that of course he remembered Joann Hansen. He had tried to help her, and then one day she had disappeared. Like the records deputy, Bonjorni was convinced that Joann was long dead and that she had been murdered.
He shared everything he knew with Ty.
Ty didn’t know what to do with the information that he had finally stumbled upon; taken by surprise, he needed time to digest what he had learned, and he had no idea where to start looking for his lost mother. Bob Hansen had lived in a lot of places since 1962, and currently he was spending most of his time in Costa Rica. Ty doubted that his father would tell him anything about his mother even if he traveled to Costa Rica to confront him.
The barn in Kent near the Green River was gone, torn down when the road was changed, a road that now paved over where the white barn had once sat. But the Valley Apartments were still there.
Ty wondered if his dad might have buried his mother under the floors of the buildings Bob owned when she waslast seen in 1962. Ty knew that Bob Hansen had cemented over part of the dirt floor in the barn not long after Joann had disappeared.
Had she lain undiscovered, deep in the ground that was now under a road?
That seemed unlikely at first; there were hundreds of places to hide a body around Washington State that were virtual wildernesses—impenetrable forests, deep lakes, and sere, sun-baked hills in eastern Washington. There was Puget Sound, just a block away from the last house Joann had lived in, that eventually emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Bob Hansen was familiar with the whole state of Washington. And he’d always had boats, boats seaworthy enough to traverse rough waters and tides in the Pacific Ocean.
“He could have
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher