Don’t Look Behind You

a moment when I almost lost it,” she says, “when someone found a large bone. I really thought we had found Joann and I started to cry. They had a sheriff’s patrol car standing by and the bone was rushed downtown for the medical examiner’s office to check it out.
    “But it wasn’t Joann; it was an animal bone. Eventually, we found so many animal bones, and every time we hoped we might have solved the mystery of where Ty’s mother was.
    “We didn’t find her at the Valley Apartments, but we sure made a mess of the lawn,” Cindy said. “My brother, Russ Tyler, went back there with grass seed to try to bring it back to the way it was.”
    From 2003 to 2005, the backbreaking work of exploring the earth for some sign of Joann Hansen continued. Luckily, there were many volunteers who joined Cindy and Ty in their sad project, ready to dig with shovels. They didn’t have enough money to rent machines that would drill and then lift cores of dirt and “anomalies” out of the ground. Neither did the King County budget.
    It was no wonder that both Ty and Cindy were burned out in their frustrating goal to find Joann and give her a proper burial where those who loved her could visit her and place flowers on her grave.
    But, like phoenixes rising from the ashes, they always found new energy to continue.

Chapter Sixteen
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
    Stymied by all the blocked pathways he had encountered, Ty Hansen had something else he needed to do. That was to confront his father with what he believed to be the truth. If he never found his lost mother, at least he could tell his father that he
knew
finally that she had never deliberately left him and his siblings. He wanted to get that message to the old man and accuse him of her murder.
    He tried to do that in 2005 and 2006, but Bob turned a deaf ear and swore at him, threatening to call police if Ty didn’t get off his property.
    And then it was early in 2008.
    Ty entered Bob Hansen’s phone number into his cell phone and hit “talk.” He heard an almost endless ringing before it went to voice mail. He wondered if his father had caller ID and was deliberately avoiding talking with him. He might be sitting there, listening. Maybe he had the kind of answering machine where he could hear his callers leave a message.
    Ty was determined to have his say; if he had to leavea message instead of confronting the old man, he would do that. He had missed the “beep” while debating what he should do, and he quickly redialed, and this time he began to speak when he heard the shrill tone.
    “I know our mother never left us on purpose,” Ty said. “I know you killed her—and I’m going to prove it.
    “You hid her somewhere,” Ty said evenly. “You murdered her way back in 1962. What did you do with her body?”
    There was only silence on the other end of the line.
    “I won’t stop until I find her bones!” Ty shouted, before he hung up. “Not until I find her bones!”
    That explained one of the yellow notes that Kathleen Huget found tacked to Bob’s wall, the one that baffled her the most.
    The frightened old man listening to that message wrote those words on a yellow note:
    “Ty: ‘I won’t stop until I find her bones!’”
    Bob Hansen was growing more paranoid, perhaps even having waking nightmares as many elderly people do. He had printed another note in late August:
    “2 MEN IN BACKYARD. THEY RAN AND JUMPED BACK FENCE—ONE GUY DROPPED BACKPACK.”

Chapter Seventeen
NOT QUITE CLOSURE
    Ty Hansen had begun his quest full of resentment and rage. He was angry that he had lost his mother so early that he couldn’t even remember her, angry at the physical and mental abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He wanted some kind of justice, an ending to the lies about Joann that would avenge his mother—but he also wanted to punish his father. He may not have thought about this aspect of his crusade when he set out.
    There came a point, however, when Ty realized that it wasn’t all about him and his pain and loss. He was nearing fifty now. In a way, he had come to know the pretty dark-haired woman who had undoubtedly perished when she was much younger than he was. Through her friends who had never forgotten her, Ty’s blurry picture of his mom began to fill in and take shape. He realized that she had lost far more than he had.
    “And I also saw that my mother’s disappearance had hurt so many people and changed their lives, and not forthe better. I