by Olsen, Gregg
“Can I get your phone number?” he asked Shelly after they’d danced for a few songs.
“Okay,” she said, playing it cool.
They parted ways later that evening. Dave never expected to see her again, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He certainly wouldn’t see her there at the bar. The Sore Thumb burned to the ground the night after they met.
He finally sucked up the courage and dialed Shelly’s number and asked if he could come down to see her in Vancouver. She said yes. In time, he made it a weekly trip. Dave fell hard for Shelly and her little girls.
“They were nice kids. Really good kids. They needed a dad. I could see that. Anyone could.”
About that time, Shelly needed a savior—someone she could use. Danny was long gone. So was Randy. She was in trouble with the house that Grandma Anna had left her. It had gone into receivership when she couldn’t come up with the money for the taxes or the loan. She quitclaimed it over to Dave Knotek.
“Dave wants to try to save it for me,” she wrote the judge, “but it needs much needed repairs. I can barely afford to care for my children. I think I’ll have to let Dave have claim to it.”
Shelly lamented the legacy of the house adjacent to the nursing home. It had been in her family for three generations.
“My grandmother lived there. My natural mother before her death. And I was raised there for the first twelve years of my life. It has been common knowledge between my family and my relatives that the house would go to me at the right time. That came in 1981. It wasn’t before that because I had a very bad marriage and my parents didn’t want me to lose it in a divorce settlement. In 1979 I separated from my husband and moved in. I know this for sure because my daughter started kindergarten in the fall . . . Save my home for my children. I would like to work with U.S. Creditcorp to see what I can do. I haven’t hurt anyone. I just want to make a future for myself.”
Later, Dave made a promise that he’d give the house back to Shelly, but in time, the house was lost to foreclosure.
As the new couple grew a little closer, Shelly tearfully confided after a doctor’s appointment that she had a bigger problem than merely trying to make ends meet for herself and her girls.
“I have cancer,” she said. “I probably won’t live to thirty.”
Dave was stunned. Shelly looked completely fine. Besides, by then he was in love with her. And now, he was held completely captive by her disclosure.
“I thought to myself,” he said many years later, “that she was going to probably die. And if she died, who was going to take care of Nikki and Sami? They really didn’t have anyone. The whole time we were together she played the cancer card. I should have known better, but I didn’t.”
After about a month in Dave’s studio apartment, the four of them moved into a red house on Fowler Street in Raymond’s Riverview neighborhood.
“I didn’t marry Shell because her kids needed me,” Dave said, “but I have to admit that was a pretty big reason behind my wanting to marry her.”
Indeed, they finally made it official in Raymond on December 28, 1987. One of the witnesses to the wedding was a young woman named Kathy Loreno, Shelly’s hairdresser and best friend. No one knew at the time that Kathy would eventually play a far bigger role in the Knotek marriage than anyone could have imagined.
Les Watson was only too glad to have his daughter get married for a third time. Indeed, he couldn’t have been more relieved. It meant that she’d probably not come around anymore for money. He’d never truly forgiven her for the rape story, though he’d learned to play nice. While her accusations hadn’t ruined him, they’d left a scar.
Shelly continued to bad-mouth her dad behind his back, though to his face she tried to worm her way back in with indirect apologies and promises to be a better person. She claimed she had cancer and she thought he’d want to know directly from her, not Lara, with whom she’d started a war over seeing the girls more frequently. When Les didn’t take her calls, Shelly wrote to him:
“I’ll always be so proud to have you as a Dad. The older I get the more I’ve realized how much I appreciate you. Dad, I’m so full of pain I just want out. You’ve known so little of my life for such a long time. Maybe the next time around . . . I won’t make the same mistakes. I’m not strong enough to go through the months ahead. But I love you, Dad, and I’ve missed you. Love, Shell.”
CHAPTER NINE
From Nikki’s perspective, it was like her mother and stepfather had started their life together with a poisoned kiss and a declaration of war. It was apparent to many, including Nikki, that Dave Knotek had been made less of a man by marrying Shelly. It was clear that her stepfather could barely function in his marriage to her mom.
Nikki recalled an incident she’d watched with the gaping eyes of a child—unblinking but petrified at the same time. Dave, thin with longish hair and tattoos that portrayed his love of the sea from his stint in the navy, was on the front porch of the Fowler house with a shotgun in suicide position. He was shaking and crying. It was after another row with her mother, another heavy spate of hatred and disgust directed at him because he didn’t make enough money or care enough about the kids.
Her mom hurled nasty invectives at him, one after another.
“You are a worthless excuse for a husband!” Shelly yelled before slamming the door with one last parting shot. “You don’t even love me or the girls! If you did, you’d work harder!”
Dave sat still and composed himself. He got in his truck and drove off like he always did after a big fight.
He was like that. Compliant. Passive. Submissive.
“I never once saw him strike her,” Nikki remembered later. “I mean rarely would he even use a cuss word toward her.”
The same couldn’t be said of Shelly.
“She’d get violent. Really violent. She’d slapped me around a few times and I didn’t hit her back because that’s not what a man does,” Dave recalled. “She’d push. Shove. Scream. Really violent. I wasn’t used to that.”
“We need to talk things out,” Shelly said more than one time, trying to keep him where she wanted him.
“I can’t be around you like this,” he said.
Shelly snuggled up to him. “This is normal. This is the way people work things out.”
“Not normal to me,” he told her.
The first time things got really bad was when Dave had a few too many drinks at a Christmas party at the Weyerhaeuser sorting yard. His coworkers brought him home to find Shelly at the door, angry as all get-out. Bugged eyes and red-faced. She pushed him and screamed so much that he ended up going to his folks and spending the night there. That, in turn, made Shelly even angrier. Shelly wanted her husband home to face the music for which she was the conductor. He had no place of refuge. After that, she did everything she could to separate Dave—and later the girls—from his family. She insisted on total control all the time, everywhere they went. If an argument ensued while they were in the car, Shelly would make Dave get out.
“Right now! Out!”
In time, Dave couldn’t function normally. It crept up on him. He didn’t know what was happening or why. He couldn’t sleep. He was always wondering when the other shoe would drop and Shelly would go into attack mode.
I need a break. Some rest. I need time away from her.
Sometimes he’d get in his truck and head up to the hills above Raymond to camp. On other occasions he’d stay with friends. He knew that life with Shelly was not like anyone else’s marriage. He didn’t miss work or climb into the depths of a whiskey bottle. He dealt with her by being away.
To survive Shelly meant avoiding her whenever possible. Even early in their marriage, Dave would retreat from her constant barrage of angry demands. Yes, she could be sweet. Yes, she could be fun. But as time went on, those attributes took a back seat to her uncontrolled anger, a temper that scared him. He knew that something wasn’t right with her. She was off. The screaming. The violent temper. The sl
amming of the doors until the hinges broke from the wooden frame. All of that. Dave would sit in his truck with a sleeping bag and pillow and ask God what to do.
“Lord, this isn’t right,” he’d say. “This isn’t normal. This isn’t how a family operates. I know it. Help me.”
“When somebody pushes, pushes, and pushes you into a corner, pretty soon you’re not going to want to be in that corner anymore. People would ask me later why I just didn’t leave. Take the kids and go. You just didn’t do that with Shelly. You can’t. She wouldn’t allow it. She’d hunt you down.”
Often when he’d return home after considerable introspection, Shelly would flip the switch and be sweet, soft voiced, and affectionate. That might last a few weeks, days, or merely a few hours.
And then the cycle would spin out of control again.
CHAPTER TEN
Years later, the house on Fowler Street in Raymond burned to the ground, leaving a big, gaping scar in the landscape—in its own way, a metaphor for the beginning of the Knotek marriage. When they passed by the spot, Nikki would frequently recall her mother’s tirades against her stepdad and herself. She’d fight to hold on to the good memories, scant as they were. Her mom loved her. That had to be true. Her mom loved Sami. That was obvious.
Painfully so.
Sometimes hitting the pause button on a life beginning to spiral out of control by moving to a new house can actually reset the situation and make things better.
Nikki hoped that would be the case.
It had to be.
Dave and Shelly Knotek moved their family into a big Craftsman rental home in Old Willapa, which they always referred to as the Louderback House, so named for its original owners, a family associated with the region’s historic maritime industry. The residence was at the end of a long private drive that snaked past farmland. The road turned sharply up a hill, where the house was tucked into the fringe of the forest. Painted dark evergreen with contrasting trim, it boasted a wide porch that swept around the corner, connecting the entry into the living room to a side door accessing the kitchen. Inside, the ceilings were at least twelve feet high; the floors, battered but beautiful hardwood; a large masonry fireplace filled a front room paneled with wide planks. Across from the living room, adjacent to the staircase, was a large bathroom with a big tub. Off to the right of the front door was the master bedroom with a window facing the front yard.
Nikki’s and Sami’s bedrooms were up a flight of improbably steep wooden stairs. Each girl had her own room, separated by an open space that they would use for a playroom. Nikki’s overlooked the grassy and wooded hillside above the kitchen. Sami’s windows took in a view of the side yard with its mature rhododendrons and the garden spigot. Two flights down, the basement was large and musty, with a furnace that burned diesel oil and smelled every bit of it—no matter the season. Shelly loved the house. She thought it was perfect and she wanted to buy, instead of rent, but that kind of expense wasn’t in the cards. Dave was working in the woods then, pulling extra hours and doing everything he could. Shelly said she might look for a job, though she never seemed to get around to it.
It was a great house, charming and comfortable.
It was also the place where everything bad started.
Anything could be a weapon. The kids knew it. Dave too. A spatula from a kitchen drawer, a fishing pole, an electric cord. Shelly Knotek would employ all of those—and anything else within her grasp—to beat her girls if she perceived they’d done something wrong. No matter how big. Or how small. When she found a punishment that worked, she looked for ways to make it even more effective, more brutal. The act of beating her children seemed to fuel her and excite her. She seemed to savor the rush of adrenaline that came with being on the attack.
“Discipline” came mostly at night, the girls later recounted.
Nikki and Sami would be asleep upstairs, unaware that their mother had been seething on the couch, making sure that their punishment would be both severe and a surprise. Shelly was a stealth attacker. Her daughters learned to wear extra clothes to bed in the event that their mom would drag them out into the yard in the middle of winter.
“Sometimes there were reasons, I guess,” Nikki said later. “Maybe we used her makeup or lost a hairbrush. Things like that. A lot of times we really didn’t know for sure what we’d done.”
Beatings like that nearly always ended in blood. On one occasion, Shelly pushed Nikki into a walk-in closet. Hard. Shelly was screaming at the top of her lungs.
“You fucking little bitch!”
Shelly jumped on Nikki and started punching and hitting while the girl cried out and begged her to stop.
“I’m sorry, Mom! I won’t do it again!”
The truth was, Nikki had no idea what had set her mother off.
Something she said? Something missing? Something else?
Nikki got up and tried to make a run for the door, but her mom grabbed her, swung her around, and shoved her up against the wall, where she hit a protruding nail.
It was only then, with Nikki’s head literally nailed to the wall, that Shelly backed off.
When she played volleyball at Raymond Elementary, Nikki wore opaque ballet tights under her shorts to conceal the bruises and bloody cuts on her legs from a phone cord—another of her mother’s favorite implements of rage.
Later, she’d accept some of the blame for her abuse because her mom “had gotten carried away during the beatings because I was trying to get away.”
While she had many opportunities to tell someone what was happening to her, Nikki didn’t. She stayed private and guarded. She didn’t want anyone to know that anything bad was happening to her or that her family was engaged in any kind of violence.
“I never even thought to tell,” she said later. “I didn’t want the attention. I didn’t want people to think I was weird. And no one ever asked. Not even once.”
Not all of the abuse was physical. Shelly employed a series of mind games on her daughters as well.
During the week before one Christmas, Shelly locked Nikki in her room. She’d told her that she was worthless and would never amount to anything.
“You fucking loser! You make me sick!”
And when Christmas Day came, Shelly acted like everything was perfect. She showered the girls with presents, served wonderful holiday treats, and for that one day, they were the happiest family in the world.
Then it was over.
Some things their mother did were routine. All of the presents were taken back from the kids within days. Shelly would tell them they were bad, or ungrateful, and that they didn’t deserve anything she’d given them.
One year Nikki got a Cabbage Patch doll. She could not have been more excited. But Shelly took it away right after she’d given it to her, and put it in a closet. The girls knew that their mother set traps for them to see if they’d gotten into anything when she was away. She’d arrange things just so or would put tiny pieces of tape on the edge of the door to see if the trigger was tripped. Nikki learned to be as careful as she could. Especially with that Cabbage Patch doll.
“I’d wait for my mom to leave and then, very carefully, I’d get the doll out of Mom’s closet, so I could hold it for a while,” she said later. “Sometimes she’d catch me. Sometimes not.”
Another Christmas, Shelly gave Nikki and Sami teddy-bear pins in their stockings. As the mountain of wrapping paper started to grow as present after present was opened, the little pins somehow went missing. Shelly became unhinged and beat both girls with an electric cord.
“You girls are the most selfish, ungrateful kids!”
With Dave’s backing, Shelly kept them up all night looking for the pins. When they finally found them—tucked inside another Christmas gift—they instantly knew who had hidden them there.
A holiday drama culminating in a beating, it seemed, had been just what Shelly had wanted for Christmas.
As the kids got older, Shelly spent considerable effort concocting n
ew techniques to make them suffer.
“The well’s about to run dry,” she announced out of the blue, referring to the water source at the new house. “No showers. Also, check with me before you try to use the bathroom.”
It was a lie she’d use over and over—even when on city water at the house on Fowler.
Whenever Shelly left her daughters alone, they’d hurry into the bathroom and shower as quickly as they could. Sami would dry the floor, the shower walls, and the faucet. She’d hide the damp towels. There could be no hint left behind that they’d done what their mother had forbidden. After cleaning up, Sami would try to make herself look as if she hadn’t had a shower at all.
“It was embarrassing going to school without a shower,” she recalled. “You want to look clean and smell good. My mom wanted to control everything. She wanted to decide when we could bathe, even when we could use the bathroom. We had to have permission. Everything as simple as a shower was considered a privilege that only she could give us.”
Sometimes after the beatings, Sami snuck into her sister’s bedroom and crawled into bed with her. She and Nikki would lie there for hours talking about how much their butts hurt and thinking of what they could do to their mother to stop her from hurting them.
“I wish we could shrink her,” Sami suggested. “Make her supersmall and put her in a cage.”
Nikki liked the idea but saw a pitfall.
“She’d get out and bite our ankles!”
They laughed about it.
“Can you imagine our mother stabbing us with little sticks and stuff?” Nikki asked.
They could.
No, shrinking Mom wouldn’t help. Not even a little.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Though no one came over to visit, appearances were important in the Knotek household. Dave saw it. Nikki did. Even Sami would later say she understood the significance of making things look “nice” no matter how far the world was tilting toward crazy. It was makeup on a bruise. A fake rose in a garden of straw and twigs. It was as if making things appear pretty just inside the front door meant that whatever was going on in the bathroom, the back bedroom, the basement, the backyard couldn’t be so bad.