by Gregg Olsen
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine, Mom.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Come here, I want to hug you.”
“I don’t feel good,” Tori said. “I feel kind of sick. I’m getting a runny nose.”
Shelly gave her a cool look. “Oh? I can help. I have something for that.”
She disappeared and returned with a couple of tablets.
“Take these.”
Sami became frantic when Tori called her later that night and told her their mother had tried to give her a couple of pills, but Tori had only taken one.
“What? What did she offer you?”
“Some pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
“Yellow ones. For my nose.”
Sami grew desperate, remembering the time her mother had given her some pills and she couldn’t even walk. Or all the times she’d fed pills to Kathy, leaving her in a stupor for hours. Her mom was always passing out medication and telling the recipients it would make them feel better when it only served to make them compliant. Or get them out of the way so she could watch TV or sit around unencumbered by having to address the needs of anyone else in the house.
“You need to throw it up, Tori. Right now.”
Tori balked a little. “Mom wouldn’t hurt me,” she said.
Sami drew a breath. After all they’d talked about, after every detail Sami knew to be true, she probably had the better grasp of what Shelly could, would, and had done. Nikki had confided in Sami that she thought at one time her parents had plotted to kill her, that she thought they were going to make her disappear after Shane vanished, because they didn’t trust that she’d stay silent forever.
No one could.
“You don’t know her, Tori. You need to get that out of you right now!”
Her sister’s urgency was a jolt.
“Okay,” Tori said. “How?”
“Try to make yourself throw it up!”
Tori said she would, although deep down she knew she couldn’t. She was afraid that if she threw up, her mom would find out and be angry with her. Maybe hurt her. She sat there in her room for a minute. She felt groggy. Whatever her mom had given her made her feel strange. She went out in the yard and poked around, all while thinking her mother was onto her.
She called her sister a second time that night.
“Get me out of here,” she said. “I can’t find Ron. He’s dead, Sami. I know it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Please.”
Sami pushed Tori to try a little harder. She didn’t want to go to the police. She’d seen how it went down when Nikki told them about Kathy. It was a losing proposition.
“Are you positive you can’t just do this for a couple more years?”
The request was ludicrous, and they both knew it.
“No, I fucking can’t, Sami. Mom’s a killer. She’ll know. She’ll probably kill me too. You know what she’s capable of, Sami.”
“Okay,” Sami said. “We’ll get you out.”
“I need out now,” Tori said. “This has to stop.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The next morning, while her mom tucked herself in front of the TV, Tori went into the pole building, continuing her quest to find any sign of Ron. It didn’t take long. A heap of his personal effects, including his underwear, sat on top of the freezer, as did some bloody bandages that had been wrapped around Ron’s feet after soaking the feet in boiling bleach water. The bloodstains were old, brownish, but Tori knew that’s what they were.
Holy shit, she thought. Why is all this here?
She stood still a minute, trying to sear what she was seeing into her brain. She wanted to catalog every single item in case her mom came to get rid of it all. Without knowing her own plans, Tori took some of the bloody items and hid them in the chicken coop.
Next, she searched the house for anything else that had belonged to Ron. He didn’t have much by then—a few books and less than a drawer of clothes—but everything was gone. She looked for a pair of jeans that had become too loose and were stashed away in one of her older sister’s dresser drawers. That, too, was gone.
She made her way to the firepit. Her parents had been acting strangely, and her mother’s admonishments to stay away from there were more than a warning. Even having heard the story from Sami, it was hard to even think about what had happened to Kathy when Tori was a little girl.
Tori needed more evidence. Something the police might be able to use to determine that Ron had been killed and disposed of somehow.
Maybe in the same way her sisters said Kathy had been.
Quickly and quietly, she leaned over and picked at the branches she’d suspected her father had placed over the burn pile. The earth had been smoothed over.
They’ve already cleaned everything, she thought. They know that someone will come.
Finally, her heart pounding harder than it ever had, Tori scooped up some dirt with ash and hurried back to the chicken house. She assumed that Ron had been disposed of in the same way her sisters said Kathy had. Her hands were shaking but she wasn’t crying. Tori knew that what she was doing had to be done.
Her mom had to be stopped.
When she went back inside, it was as if nothing had happened. Her mom was sitting there. Doing her thing, which amounted to very little at all. Tori went upstairs.
Shelly went about her business. She wrote out a change of address card for Ron’s Lowe’s credit card account, putting Monohon Landing as his old address. She didn’t have a new street address for him; however, she’d apparently settled on a city for Ron. Not Winlock, Winthrop, or any other place that far away.
She put down Tacoma.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Raymond was a million miles away. At least it sometimes felt that way. Nikki didn’t like looking back. She was married. She was going to build a family despite what her mother and father had done to her. How do you explain wallowing in the mud to anyone? Or the cruelty that her mother had inflicted upon Kathy?
Or Shane.
What about him?
On August 6, 2003, Nikki and Sami drove down to Pacific County to tell the sheriff what they knew to be true. They were as scared and nervous as they’d ever been in their lives. The drive was punctuated by what-ifs and then long stretches of anguished silence. Tears too. What was happening was big. Bigger than them. Big because it was overdue and, the sisters knew, likely too late to save Ron. It was Nikki’s second time sitting down with Deputy Jim Bergstrom. The first time had been an epic failure. Nothing had come of it at all. Why hadn’t anyone helped? It couldn’t be laid solely at the feet of Sami for not talking to the sheriff. In fact, Bergstrom and another deputy had been at Monohon Landing to inquire about Ron. They knew he was holed up there and that Shelly Knotek’s history was less than stellar.
Around town, people called her Psycho Shelly.
They also knew Kathy Loreno had last been seen alive in Shelly’s company. And that Ron had been the one to call 911 when Mac had supposedly fallen from his wheelchair, leaving Shelly the ultimate recipient of the World War II vet’s estate.
With tears and long pauses to work up the courage for what they needed to say, the Knotek sisters gave their story—the same one Nikki had told before. This time was different. This time, they were believed. Others from the prosecutor’s office and law enforcement came in and out of the interview room at the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. Deputy Bergstrom and members of the prosecutor’s staff recorded everything they said. It was at once shocking and painful. Nikki and Sami saw the outcome as twofold: a rescue operation for their little sister, and accountability for their parents for everything they’d done.
“If Ron’s dead,” Nikki told the deputy, her voice breaking as she looked him squarely in the eye, “you could have stopped it.”
Bergstrom didn’t reply, which was fine by Nikki; there
probably wasn’t anything he could have said that would have made any difference anyway.
After disclosing nearly every appalling detail, they got back in Nikki’s car for the drive home to the Seattle area. It was pitch dark and the moon hung high in the sky. They were emotionally beaten. Sad and angry at the same time. And scared. But mostly they thought about their little sister and how her world was going to be rocked when Child Protective Services arrived the next morning to get her.
“She’s going to be okay,” Nikki said.
Sami agreed. “She’s stronger than we were.”
Nikki tossed and turned all night, unable to shake any of it from her mind. When she crawled out of bed, she called the one ally that she’d always had growing up, her grandmother, Lara. When she couldn’t get her on the phone, she e-mailed her.
“You need to call me. I was in Raymond until 1 a.m. last night. CPS is taking Tori out of the house this a.m. at 8:00. Mother and Dave did something very bad AGAIN! I was with Pacific County prosecutor and Sami came with me too.”
Tori phoned Nikki a couple of times wondering what was happening with the police.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just hang on, Tori.”
“How long? I can’t stay here.”
“We’re getting you out. I promise.”
Later that same day, Shelly called to discuss Sami’s upcoming birthday plans.
“Dad’s taking you surfing!” she said.
“I’m so excited,” Sami said, straining to keep her voice from betraying what she’d done. Despite everything, it was hard for Sami not to warn her mother. “Pack your shit and run. You need to get out of there, Mom! They are coming to get you!”
She didn’t, of course. She’d never been more frightened in her life. There was no stopping what was about to happen now.
Tori was only fourteen, but she was strong. While she waited all night and the next day for her parents to get arrested, she called Sami again and again.
“They haven’t done anything,” she said of the sheriff. “Mom’s still home. I’m still here. What’s taking so long?”
Sami wasn’t sure. She thought once they’d come forward, things would move quickly. They all thought that. She was worried too.
“I know they are working the case,” she told Tori.
“You keep saying that,” Tori said, “but I don’t know.”
Sami did her best to calm her little sister. She could see that, while Tori’s edges were fraying, she remained clear and with a sense of purpose.
“I hid Ron’s clothes in the chicken coop,” Tori told her.
“Good. That’s good.”
Tori also prepared for the authorities to comb through the house for evidence. She wrote a note on white-and-pink-lined paper with a cheerful bumblebee flying across the top.
Dear FBI, police, etc.
Please don’t ruin all of my things when you’re investigating. Nothing of interest is here anyways. Please leave all of my personal belongings alone. Please find the animals good homes.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
When the knock came the next morning, Tori stood by the front door. She didn’t open it right away. She didn’t want her mother to know how glad she was that the sheriff had finally arrived. As she watched him approach, the fourteen-year-old recognized Deputy Jim Bergstrom as the man who’d come by the house on an earlier occasion asking about Ron.
When Shelly joined her, she leaned into her daughter and whispered, “What did you do? Did you say anything?”
Tori looked right at her mother. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t bat an eye.
“No, Mom. No.”
The deputy told Shelly that he—and caseworkers for CPS—were there for Tori. They were taking her in on suspected child abuse. Shelly immediately went into outraged overdrive. Tori could tell that her mom was scared too. She didn’t say much, just repeated that she didn’t understand what was going on.
Bergstrom followed Tori upstairs where she collected a change of clothes and some personal items. Her face was white, and a slight pinkish rash appeared by her ear and down her neck. It was a familiar marker. Even when she couldn’t say how scared or worried she was, her body showed how she felt.
Tori whispered in the deputy’s ear.
“You need to get a search warrant and come back,” she said. “In the pole building there’s a bunch of Ron’s stuff. I’m pretty sure my parents are going to burn all of it. I put some stuff in the chicken coop. To hide it.”
Just outside the door, she told another officer that her mother had given her two small yellow pills a couple of weeks ago. Tori had only taken one of the pills, which had made Shelly angry.
“Well, then,” she’d said, “you don’t trust me.”
When Tori told her story to Pacific County investigators that afternoon, she minimized most of what had happened to her. She said what she knew about Ron and how she thought he was dead. She didn’t know anything about Kathy because she had been too young at the time. She was careful in what she said because, in her mind, there was always the chance that they’d release her back to her mom.
If they send me back home, what will my mom do to me? she thought.
She later said that she had only told the police “like ten percent of the bad stuff.”
Investigators, however, understood that 10 percent of a nightmare is still a nightmare.
Sami looked at her phone and tried to steady herself. It was the call she’d been dreading. She considered letting it go to voice mail and maybe even pretending she’d never gotten the call.
It was her mom’s number.
Shit had hit the fan, and it was about to splatter all over Pacific County.
“Mom?”
There was no “Hi, honey” or anything like that. Just a rapid-fire launch into what had happened.
What Sami and her sister had made happen.
“They took Tori away just now, Sami! The police!” Shelly exclaimed. “They came and got her for child abuse. I don’t know what’s going on? Do you?”
Sami took a breath and played dumb.
“What’s going on, Mom?”
Shelly was fuming, sputtering. Her sentences ran on. “I’ve never even laid a hand on her. I don’t think I’ve ever even grounded the girl! And every time I did, I took it back.”
Her mother’s lies always seemed so convincing.
“Oh Mom,” Sami said. “I’m so sorry.”
In many ways, that wasn’t a lie. Sami was sorry for so many things. Sorry that she hadn’t seen the warning signs that her sister was being abused. Sorry she hadn’t been more skeptical with Ron when he told her he was okay. Sorry that she hadn’t backed up her sister when Nikki and her grandmother told the authorities about Kathy.
Sami also felt sorry for her mother. Shelly sounded desperate. She was trapped and clawing through the phone to get out of her situation, a situation of her own doing. She thought that it was all about Tori. Oh boy. She had no idea that Tori being taken from Monohon Landing was only the tip of the spear.
Shelly was reeling by then. “Did she say anything when she stayed with you?” she asked. “That she and I didn’t get along?”
Again, Sami, the peacemaker, the middle kid, the one who had almost been her mom’s favorite, lied.
“No, Mom,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Do you think Nikki would have called the cops or said something about Kathy? And that’s why they took Tori?”
“No, Mom,” Sami said. “No, she wouldn’t do that.”
Sami made a quick call to Nikki.
“Mom’s freaking out.”
“Good,” Nikki said. “She should be.”
Nikki made the mistake of picking up the phone to hear her mother’s tirade that someone had complained about how she’d been mistreating Tori and how she’d been taken away by Child Protective Services.
“Ripped from my arms for no reason!” Shelly screamed.
Nikki didn’t know what t
o say. She didn’t want to tell her mom that she and Sami had been the complainants or that Tori herself had played a part in her own emancipation from Monohon Landing.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said.
Of course, she wasn’t. In fact, after all Shelly had done to her, Kathy, Shane, Tori, Sami, and Ron, how could anyone sympathize with a predicament that was her own doing?
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this right away!” Shelly swore.
She said that the cops were out to get her. Tori was not an abused child. She was the opposite. She’d been spoiled. Given every advantage. Shelly could see no reason why anyone would want to harm Tori in the ugly way the authorities had suggested.
Shelly spat out more anger, excuses, and denial, and the call mercifully ended.
Nikki began to feel a little uncertain about what she’d done, the storm she and her sisters had created by telling the truth. She e-mailed her grandmother that she was falling apart and was thinking that her mother might be innocent of any wrongdoing.
Lara fired back a response. She’d talked with the police and county prosecutors for more than two hours and was beginning to feel the constant drip of the investigation and its stop/start impact on everyone.
“I told them about Shelly calling you last night and they said . . . You are NOT to answer the phone from her. DO NOT . . . It is imperative!!!!! Shelly is running around screaming at everyone blaming them . . . She is like a cornered RAT . . . Get that restraining order and block the phone . . .”
Lara knew Shelly better than anyone. She’d watched her stepdaughter operate and work things in a way that were at utter odds with the truth. If the sky was blue, Shelly had a way of insisting it was green. She was a master manipulator. This time she wasn’t going to get away with what she’d done.
“Your mom is now putting stuff into your mind and accusing everyone else for talking about her. The authorities said DO NOT FALL for it.”
The police weren’t talking either. There was no way to find out what was going on except by calling home. Sami and Nikki needed an update.