by Gregg Olsen
“Kathy’s moving in,” Shelly announced.
The statement seemed to come out of the blue, and not just for the kids. Dave knew Shelly was good friends with her hairdresser, but live with them? This was a complete surprise to him.
“Why’s she moving in here?” he asked.
“Her family doesn’t want her,” Shelly said. “She needs a place to live. Plus, she’s going to help me with the baby. Like a midwife.”
Dave didn’t argue, though he wanted to. He’d tried to push back on Shane moving in, but Shane’s dad was back in prison and the boy needed a stable environment if there was any hope to end the cycle of crime. He could see that Shelly had made up her mind and didn’t care what he had to say anyway.
Shelly and Dave moved Kathy’s twin bed and dresser to the open space between Sami’s and Nikki’s rooms on the second floor. They decorated the walls with some of Kathy’s things and set out her yarn basket and other items that she’d brought along. She was thirty years old and out of work, having been let go at the salon, and grateful to be with such good friends.
To the kids, Shelly appeared to be rescuing Kathy from an old life that she didn’t want anymore, and Kathy seemed fine with that. Appreciative, even. Early on, Shelly told her she didn’t need to work and they would take care of her.
“You need to stay with us, Kathy,” she said. “It will be so fun. Plus, I really need you.”
The last part was the hook.
Shelly needed Kathy all right. She told her that it was for the medical appointments at first, then the new baby. Then it was her four unruly kids who needed Kathy’s good judgment and support. Kathy seemed up for the challenge.
Nikki watched the interloper with skeptical and anxious eyes, scrutinizing her mother’s bossy hairdresser/best friend. She could see the dynamic that was developing between Kathy and her mom. Kathy worshipped Shelly. She hung on Shelly’s every word. Shelly stood upon a pedestal above all others, godlike. Kathy seemed to embrace that.
“No one works harder than your mom,” Kathy insisted. “I don’t know why you girls and Shane can’t do more to help her.”
If Kathy overheard anything that she thought was impertinent to Shelly, she’d pull the offender aside.
“Do you listen to yourself?” she hissed. “Don’t be so disrespectful.”
Likely because she was in a favored position with her mother, Sami adored Kathy right away. On the other hand, Nikki and Shane thought she was an overbearing busybody whose sole purpose was to make their lives more difficult by telling them what to do. It was like having two mothers. Shelly undoubtedly had briefed Kathy about what was up with the two oldest: Nikki was defiant and Shane was incorrigible.
“She wasn’t mean to us kids,” Nikki recounted. “She came into the house where my mom was yelling at us constantly. She thought we were just horrible kids. We were always in trouble for something. Shane had cigarettes occasionally and got caught with marijuana one time. She thought Shane was a bad kid.”
And if Kathy didn’t know much about the Knotek kids, they knew even less about her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kathy Loreno’s mother, Kaye Thomas, was a striking woman with a knack for short-lived marriages. Kaye’s parents had raised her in North Hollywood, California, where her dad worked for NBC. Her mom took a job at Lockheed to support the family during wartime. When Kaye was older, she took a job at a high-end cosmetics counter in Hollywood. It was a life of hard work with a touch of glamor.
Kaye’s youngest daughter, Kelly, remembers her mother as an unhappy woman who seldom smiled but worked hard and loved to read. By 1952, she had the first of her children, a son. Later, three more children would follow. Two were girls, Kathy and Kelly.
When Kathy was born in the summer of 1958, she came into the world with the most beautiful blue eyes, like big blue marbles. Blonde hair too. She looked like her mother, who had once posed as the Langendorf Bread model in the 1930s.
Husbands came and went while the family moved from place to place—Lompoc, Moorpark, Simi Valley. Kelly came four years after Kathy; another brother after that. While money was often tight, Kathy and her siblings grew up mostly in middle-class neighborhoods, places where parents worked as plumbers and printers and moms stayed home. Kids would go out to play in the summer and not come home until dinner. Kathy and Kelly always shared a bedroom, twin beds separated by a vanity. Barbies and the clothes their mother sewed were strewn everywhere. They read bedtime stories from their mother’s childhood books nearly every night. Certainly, there was drama. Drama always found Kaye. But the kids were happy.
After Kathy’s stepfather died, her mother bought a camper and took the kids camping around California. It became the source of indelible memories. Kathy made purses out of old jeans, and the two sisters would stuff their bags with snacks, climb into the top of the camper, and spend hours watching the road and talking about life. Kathy liked the boy across the street, but it was only a friendship. She lived for the monthly release of Harlequin and Silhouette books. She bought them all and devoured them long before the next month arrived. She also adored country music, with Dolly Parton and the Gatlin Brothers as her favorites.
When Kathy was about eighteen, Kaye told the kids they were headed up north to South Bend, Washington, for a family vacation. After days on the road and nights in Motel 6’s—the kids dreaming of at least one Howard Johnson’s with a pool—they arrived in Pacific County, Washington.
“It was summer and gray and dark,” Kelly recalled. “Typical Washington Coast.”
Shortly after the vacation trip up north, Kaye quit her job as a cook at a Thousand Oaks Steakhouse and made a big announcement to the three children still at home.
“We’re moving up to Washington!”
The declaration landed with a thud. No one liked the idea. They lived in a big rental on a corner lot in Simi Valley. It had four bedrooms and six walnut trees—a much-needed source of family income at Christmas time. It was home in every sense, especially for a family that had seen dads come and go.
They had no idea what they were getting into, but all of them knew what they were leaving behind.
Little sister Kelly couldn’t see any sense in the family moving up to Washington. Kaye had little money. No job. Still, she brought her kids and mother to South Bend in the summer of 1977. Kathy, nineteen, was in the middle of cosmetology training and transferred her credits from Simi Valley to a beauty school in Aberdeen. They settled in a tiny turn-of-the-century wood-frame house for which Kaye paid just over $25,000.
She didn’t work and they had very little money left after she bought the house.
“I couldn’t understand what my mom was thinking,” Kelly said pointedly. “How are we going to get by?”
Kathy continued her studies at the beauty school and landed a job at a local salon. It was tough going, however, to build a client base in a place like Pacific County. Most stylists’ clients were their friends. And most friends were the result of longtime relationships.
The county was small by population, but its walls were huge for a young newcomer to scale. For Kathy, a girl with a kind yet sometimes bashful personality, they were impassable.
Of Kaye Thomas’s daughters, Kelly was the stronger of the two. By far. She had a better understanding of what she wanted and didn’t want out of life than her big sister. First of all, she needed to get out of South Bend. She wanted to go to college. She wanted to have a fulfilled and happy marriage.
Kathy was stuck, though. She had her dreams, but she didn’t know how to get them going.
“My mom took advantage of Kathy, who was very much a pleaser,” recalled Kelly. “When Kathy started working at the salon, she and my mom shared a single checking account. Mom worked, but Kathy’s paycheck paid the bills.”
When Kelly, who didn’t drive until twenty-one, needed a ride, it was Kathy who drove her. She was glad for the ride, of course; she just didn’t think why her sister was always so available. And a
lways so kind.
When she was younger, Kathy often babysat for free when she knew a family was poor. She once lamented to a neighbor that her family didn’t have enough money for the holidays, so a bunch of kind people showed up with gifts. It embarrassed Kaye, though, in truth, they were in need. Kathy scrimped and saved and bought their mother a “mother’s ring” for Christmas. For their mother’s forty-fifth birthday, it was Kathy who dreamed up and planned a surprise birthday party.
She was a complete giver.
Many years later, when Kathy went to visit Kelly in Seattle to see Neil Diamond in concert, they walked past a panhandler by the arena and Kathy immediately reached in her purse to offer him some money.
“I thought to myself that my sister could never make it here,” Kelly said later of life in the big city. “She is too nice.”
When her father was killed in a workplace accident on a TV production set, Kathy and her brother were awarded the proceeds of a wrongful death lawsuit. Kathy wanted more than anything to buy a new car, maybe a Camaro or a Trans Am, but at a family member’s urging, Kathy ditched her car dreams and instead put money on a house not far from her mother’s.
She was independent and working at the salon in Aberdeen.
Making a life.
It didn’t last long.
As hard as Kathy tried, she couldn’t get her sales volume to where the salon’s corporate owners said it needed to be. She lost her job and became depressed. Nothing was going right. She started to drown financially, so much so that she lost the house and was forced to move back in with her mother. It was a stunning and sad reversal of fortune. Not long after she moved in with her mom, Kathy was told she needed to start paying rent. She’d done so much for her mother, but this time the tables had turned. She didn’t have any money. She did, however, have a very good friend. She’d even been a member of her wedding party.
Her name was Shelly Knotek.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Having a child of his own, and all the anticipation that comes with such an occasion, marked the one time in his marriage to Shelly when Dave Knotek was truly happy. Even so, with Kathy and Shane already in the household, a new baby would mean yet another mouth to feed. Dave felt the pressure of his role as the sole provider and worked harder than ever. Shane was family, and although he needed correction now and then when it came to doing chores around the house, Dave considered him mostly a good kid. For her part, Kathy was there to help with the pregnancy and prenatal appointments, as well as keep up with Shelly’s cancer treatments. Though he never said it to anyone at the time, it passed through Dave’s mind that it was extraordinary that his wife had even become pregnant, what with all the chemo she was taking to beat her cancer. This new baby? An undisputed miracle, that’s what.
When Shelly said it was time to get to the hospital in Olympia, she told Dave that Kathy would be driving her.
It was the first he’d heard of that plan.
“I don’t get to drive you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “You follow us.”
Dave was stupefied. “Really?”
Shelly shut him down.
“You heard me, Dave.”
When Tori Knotek was born the first week of June 1989, it was Dave, though, not Kathy, who got to hold her first. She was all wrapped up, a little gray in her skin tone but the most beautiful little thing he’d ever seen in his life. Her eyes were blue and her hair a fuzzy blonde.
“I will never forget that,” he said. “She opened her eyes and I was the first thing she ever saw.”
Tori, Shelly said, was a preemie with underdeveloped lungs. Dave thought at the time that Kathy being there to help was a godsend. He doubted Shelly could have found a better helper than Kathy.
Shortly after they returned home, Shelly announced in dramatic fashion that Tori had stopped breathing but she was able to revive her. The next day, she and Kathy took Tori back to the hospital where she stayed under the watchful eyes of the neonatal staff for about a week.
“I don’t know if Shell saved her or not,” Dave said later. “She said she did.”
For a while, despite the drama, things seemed better. Shelly, then in her midthirties, appeared to revel in the worry that something might go wrong with the baby. While Tori was not really a preemie, Shelly told Nikki and Sami that the week-early birth had left their baby sister with some heart problem that needed to be watched. She was sent home with a special bed and the riggings of a heart monitor.
Every night after the girls had gone to bed, they’d be awakened by the sounds of alarms going off and a panic ensuing downstairs. They’d hurry down to find their mother cradling the baby with a terrified look in her eyes.
“Is she okay?” Sami worried about her little sister.
“She’s fine now. She’s fine,” Shelly said, rocking Tori back and forth. Shelly was the calm in a terrifying storm, soaking in the concern and worry from her older girls and doing her best to put them at ease.
One time Nikki came downstairs to find their mother holding a pillow over Tori’s face.
“She’s okay now,” Shelly said, looking up from the baby, a startled expression on her face.
The alarms hadn’t gone off yet.
Nikki had arrived too early.
Later, she’d think of the time her mother had come into the room when she was little, the time she’d thought her mom had put a pillow over her face.
Had she done that to all of them?
After that, Nikki and Sami kept an eye out for their baby sister. No one talked about what they suspected had been going on. No one needed to push Shelly. She seemed interested in her new baby, but only in a peripheral way. As the weeks went on, Kathy and the older girls took on a greater role.
Shelly went back to watching TV and staying up at all hours of the night.
Dave, however, saw Shelly as the best mother he’d ever known.
“She was excellent with babies,” he said later. “Really the best baby mom ever.”
Shelly liked bathing and dressing her girls when they were infants, loved showing them off. She seemed to bask in the attention that came from new motherhood. However, as the girls grew older, Shelly seemed less interested in any of that. She moved from one daughter to the next youngest until her focus was on Tori all day, every day.
Many years later, Sami’s father, Danny, came to see her, and he told her something that gave her a different perception of how her mother cared for babies than what she’d heard from Dave Knotek.
“I always thought that she was better with babies than kids, especially as we got older,” Sami said of her mother, but eventually questioned even that. “My biological father told me he watched my mother pop up from the couch and run to the crib to get me. She wanted to appear as though she’d been holding me the whole time. But she hadn’t. He could tell that I’d been in my crib all day. Dirty diapers. Bottles lying in there. Diaper rash that was something terrible.”
For someone who always had so much to hide, Shelly had become an expert at keeping things out of view. It was a skill that would help her keep the darkest secrets from her family.
And the authorities.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The kids were gathered around Sami, the birthday girl, with flickering white candles on a pink birthday cake. Shelly liked to make a show of holidays and special occasions. Birthdays were an especially big deal. It didn’t matter if money was tight or even nonexistent; Shelly found a way to pile up the presents and fill the refrigerator with treats. Sami dove through the mountain of presents stacked before her on the picnic table on their porch. Shelly gave her daughter a Popple, a stuffed toy that all the girls had wanted that year. Kathy gave Sami a gold necklace with a small heart pendant. Sami was thrilled and put it on right away. It was real jewelry, and it was special mostly because Kathy was special.
Everyone was having a great time, when the mood darkened with a question from her mother.
“What’s your favorite present
?”
Sami grinned from ear to ear and touched the necklace. “Kathy’s present. I love this necklace so much! Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes, it is,” Shelly said.
Later, after everyone had gone, Shelly got out a belt and beat the birthday girl.
“You ungrateful little brat! I put this party together. I got your friends here! I’m the one who made all of this happen. I got you beautiful things. Kathy’s necklace wasn’t even new! It was something she had around the house!”
In tears, and sore where her mom had beat her, Sami learned a valuable lesson—her favorite present must always be the one her mother had given.
Lara Watson had done all right for herself, working in the medical field, specializing in senior care facilities—a legacy from her time in Battle Ground as Les Watson’s wife. Divorced for more than two years by then, she was living in a small house on NW Cherry Street in Vancouver when she took a call from a very distraught and, now, very specific Shelly Knotek.
“It’s confirmed,” Shelly said. “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
The news sent a jolt through Lara’s body. She started crying. Hard. For all of their differences, Shelly was family. She was also a mother and had little girls depending on her. It was heartbreaking news.
Shelly told Lara that she was getting treatment, but that it was very, very serious.
A few days later, Shelly called a second time. This time she said the doctors had been wrong. It wasn’t lymphoma but cancer of the pituitary gland.
Lara had never heard of such a thing. She wondered how the doctors could make such a colossal mistake and change the diagnosis in the middle of a treatment plan.
“It didn’t really make sense to me,” she said later. “And I was in the medical field.”
She asked Shelly about treatment.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “I’m not sure how much time I have left. I’m going to see a specialist.”