If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood

by Gregg Olsen

  Shelly wanted to control people. She loathed any scenario in which she wasn’t the center square. It was like their family was a cult of some kind: Nikki had escaped first, then Sami. The world outside of Raymond was a more beautiful—and happy—place than Tori had ever thought possible. She was Dorothy from Kansas, transported to the colorful world over the rainbow. It was obvious who their mom had been in that scenario.

  Her mom. The thought of Shelly snapped Tori back to her biggest fear. She obsessed that she wouldn’t be able to keep the reunion a secret.

  “Yes, you can,” Sami insisted. “I have. You can.”

  “I don’t know,” Tori said.

  Sami remained upbeat, encouraging. “I do. Because I know you.”

  Sami retrieved some laundry from the dryer, and the two of them sat down and started folding.

  “Funny story,” Sami went on. “I remember when Mom used to wake me up in the middle of the night and dump out all my drawers, I mean everything, out on to the floor. She wanted me to make sure everything was matched and if I had a sock that wasn’t, look out. I had to look for it all night. Like until three in the morning.”

  Tori sat there quiet for a minute.

  “Mom does that to me,” she finally said, looking up and meeting her sister’s gaze.

  Sami felt her heart race. No, she thought. Fuck. No. No. This can’t be. Not Tori.

  “I had asked her every time I saw her if she was okay,” Sami said later. “It was my job to protect that girl. But I failed. I did. I didn’t ask the right questions. I didn’t tell her what I knew. I just asked if she was okay. If Mom was okay.”

  “What else does Mom do to you, Tori?”

  Tori looked at Sami, who was crumbling in front of her eyes, and gave her a truncated list of the things their mother had done to her. It was a kind of bingo of Shelly’s standard punishments—the same things she’d done to all of them—to Shane, Kathy, Nikki, and herself.

  “Does she let you go to sleep?” Sami asked.

  “No.”

  “Does she make you do things naked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lock you out all night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On the front porch?”

  “Right.”

  Sami was crying by then. She put her arms around her sister.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Tori?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was just me, I guess. I didn’t know Mom did any of that before. I thought you and Nikki had a happy childhood.”

  Sami knew where she had to go next. This was her chance, an opening to ask for a dose of reality from her little sister. “Did she do anything to Ron?” she asked.

  Tori started to cry. She could see that her sister’s question wasn’t really a question at all. It was a statement.

  A truth.

  Tori gulped some air. “Yes,” she said. “All of it. And other stuff too.” She took in her sister’s reaction. She wasn’t shocked. She took it like it was meant to be, a confirmation of what she likely already knew.

  “How did you know about this?” Tori asked.

  Sami swallowed hard. “She did it before. She did it to all of us. She did it to Kathy.”

  Kathy had never left Sami’s mind. She could play back every image she’d ever collected in her brain growing up at the Louderback House or the farmhouse at Monohon Landing—the good and the ugly. Lately things had become clearer. It might have been the letter sent by whomever it was. It might have been the guilt she felt for not backing up her older sister when Nikki went to the police. Though she would have, Sami told herself, if the sheriff had tried harder. She would have braced for her world to come crashing down if she’d thought for one second that Tori was being abused.

  Tori had seemed okay. And the police hadn’t followed through.

  So she didn’t tell.

  Sami delved deeper. “Did Ron ever try to run away?”

  Tori nodded. “Yeah, lots of times. But Mom and me always found him and brought him back.”

  “Kathy did too,” Sami said.

  “Did Mom make Kathy do weird stuff? Chores?” Tori asked.

  “Yeah,” Sami said. “She had to do the dishes naked.”

  Tori retrieved an early memory of Kathy from the house in Old Willapa. Tori had been around two years old. Kathy was in the bathroom on the main floor. She wore a thin lime-green nightgown. Her hair was falling out and she moved very slowly.

  “What’s wrong?” Tori had asked Kathy, but before she could answer, her mother hooked an arm around her daughter and yanked her away. Shelly didn’t say anything, but after that, Tori knew that she wasn’t supposed to ask those kinds of questions. It wasn’t her place to talk to Kathy. Not like that.

  Now Sami and Tori held each other and cried. They held nothing back.

  Except maybe one thing.

  Sami could barely speak. Inside, she knew she had to say the words to her little sister.

  “Mom killed Kathy,” Sami choked out. “They burned her in the yard.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Shelly stood in front of the kitchen sink, falling apart. She’d never looked worse. She’d gained more than twenty pounds over the past year. Her red hair needed a Clairol refresh. That was on the surface, of course. Inside, the combination of the anonymous letter and Ron’s demise had crushed her bravado, the self-assuredness that typically gave her the confidence to do the unthinkable without batting an eye.

  Dave was the first to broach the need to come up with something to explain Ron’s sudden departure from Monohon Landing. Coming up with cover stories was well-trod territory for the Knoteks. Kathy was off with Boyfriend Rocky touring the country. Shane was in Alaska, fishing off Kodiak Island. Nikki had left Raymond to pursue a new life in Seattle. They hadn’t merely vanished; they’d gone somewhere they’d always wanted to go.

  No one seemed all that interested in Ron, though. That was good. It would work in the Knoteks’ favor.

  Dave, who had always been passive in their marriage, could see that Shelly was flailing. He came up with the initial plan. Inside, he was a wreck too, but they both couldn’t be undone by emotions. One of them had to pull it together.

  “He was staying at Mac’s for the last couple of weeks,” he suggested. “He was looking for a job.”

  “Right,” Shelly, said, almost by rote. “We gave him some money for bus fare.”

  Dave took a breath. He was not a master of fiction, even though living with Shelly meant learning to lie.

  “I gave him a ride to Olympia to catch the bus,” he went on. “He decided to go to San Diego.”

  Shelly brightened a little. “Right. He was talking about that.” The idea seemed plausible enough to calm her a little. She worried about what Tori would think, but convinced herself that her daughter believed everything she said.

  “I’ll tell her when she gets home from Sami’s,” Shelly said.

  Dave thought that was best.

  That night they practiced the story over and over, backward, forward, adjusting a little when tiny cracks in logic worked their way into the conversation. Ron needed money. He needed some food. New clothes. Everything that had eluded him at Monohon Landing was woven into the story line.

  And yet there was room for doubt. The slightest error, the tiniest blip in the story, could be their undoing.

  As a backup scenario, Shelly played out the concept that Ron had been suicidal over Gary again. She told Dave that when she was bandaging his feet in the bathroom shortly before he died, Ron had a full view of the open medicine cabinet.

  She’d also made a discovery in one of the outbuildings, she said.

  “I found these in the chicken house.” She held out a pair of amber-colored pill bottles. “Ron must have taken these.”

  Dave didn’t look closely at the bottles. He didn’t need to. What Shelly was saying made sense. Ron had been distraught. He had, in fact, threatened suicide several times. Dave thought back to the time Ron received
the restraining order from his mother and how that had crushed him. He’d threatened suicide over that too. There was another time when he told Dave that he’d wished he’d just die so that everyone could be better off.

  “That’s how I feel,” Ron had said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  This isn’t happening. Not again. The realization that Shelly was doing to Tori what she’d done to the older Knotek sisters was devastating to Sami. She and Tori talked into the early-morning hours. It was a horrific matching game—what had happened before, and what was going on now. Tears and rage fueled the conversation. Regret too.

  And fear. Lots of fear.

  There was the question that Sami dreaded above all others. She’d been thinking about Ron and how he was supposedly off getting a new job somewhere, even though the last time she’d seen him he didn’t look like he could do any work of any kind.

  “How’s Ron?” she asked.

  Tori didn’t need to answer with words. The look on her face told Sami what she needed to know.

  “I think he’s dead,” she said. “I think Mom did something to him too.”

  That brought more tears and a wave of emotion fell over Sami too. She thought back to her mother’s recent calls. She’d been in touch more frequently the past couple of weeks. Shelly had told her during one conversation that Ron was looking for work out of the area.

  “Up in Winlock,” Shelly said. “At a trailer park. We really need him to get this job. I need you to pray for it. Pray that he gets it.”

  Something about her mother’s story hadn’t seemed right. Whenever Sami talked with her little sister, Tori said Shelly told her that Ron was staying over at Mac’s place, helping to get it ready for sale.

  “It’s time for him to get out on his own,” Shelly said.

  “I guess so,” Sami had agreed, not knowing what else to say. The last time she saw him, Ron had been a mess. There was no way he could go out on his own anywhere and survive.

  She kicked herself for not doing more. She’d seen the problems with Ron. She knew the warning signs. Yet in order to survive, she’d swum in a sea of denial. No life preserver. Just Sami bobbing along until a wave would suck her downward.

  And drown her.

  Sami pulled herself together. It was after two in the morning.

  “We need to tell Nikki,” she said.

  No one expects good news from a call at that hour. A car accident. A heart attack. Some kind of tragedy that can’t wait until morning.

  Nikki took the call.

  It was worse than anything she could have imagined.

  Sami told her about the abuse that had been going on. All that she’d missed. How Tori was locked in a dog kennel and sprayed with a hose. The nudity. The withholding of food. And Ron Woodworth.

  “She did the same thing to Kathy, Nikki.”

  “I don’t know what we should do,” Nikki said. She was in a completely different world than she’d been when she went to Raymond and made the first complaint about their mother, almost exactly two years earlier in July 2001. She was happy. She had a man in her life that she loved. She didn’t want to rock the boat by revisiting what her mother had done.

  “We have to get Tori out of there,” Sami said.

  Nikki knew Sami was right, though getting the police involved hadn’t made a difference before. And Nikki wouldn’t put anything past her mother or father when it came to what they might do in revenge. Her mom had tortured a woman to death and lied about it. She’d made Nikki complicit in her scheme to fool Kathy’s family into thinking she was off touring the country with Rocky. She’d forced her to wallow in the mud nude. Dave Knotek wasn’t any better. He’d tossed a brick through a window to get her fired from a job. He’d tailed her up in Bellingham. Dave was Himmler to her mother’s Hitler, blindly doing whatever evil bidding she’d demanded.

  “It didn’t work last time,” Nikki said.

  Sami knew that was true. She also knew that there would be hell to pay for turning in their parents. They’d all go down in flames one way or another. People might wonder why they hadn’t gone to the police sooner. They’d wonder how they could have looked the other way.

  Sami took a breath. “Maybe Tori can manage to get through this, you know, like we did.”

  Nikki wasn’t sure, though given all likely outcomes, she let herself believe that was the best course. The sisters worked to convince themselves that it would be okay.

  “She’s fourteen,” Sami went on. “She only has a few more years.”

  “I know. She can do this.”

  “She can.”

  “But if she can’t, Nikki . . . If she can’t do this, we need to get her out of there,” Sami said.

  Nikki agreed, and eventually brought up the subject of Shane.

  Sami had accepted the story that Shane had run away, though they’d barely looked for him.

  “Mom did something to Shane, Sami,” Nikki insisted.

  When it came to Shane’s absence, the two oldest Knotek girls had only ever talked about it in whispers. They kept going back to the birdhouse their mother insisted he left for her along with a sweet little note.

  Nikki had always been the most skeptical. “Shane would never have left her that note with the birdhouse,” Nikki said. “He hated her guts.”

  “Okay, Nikki,” Sami reasoned, “but Mom wouldn’t really hurt us. Shane was our brother.”

  When Sami hung up her phone, she went back to Tori.

  “We need to figure out what’s best,” she said. “Do you think you can give us some time, maybe wait this out? You’ll be eighteen in four years.”

  Tori said she wanted to do what was best for everyone, but she was filled with righteous anger. More than anything, she wanted her mom to pay for what she’d done to all of them.

  “She needs to be stopped,” she said. “You know that, Sami. She’s evil. She’s probably the worst person in the world. Look at what she’s done. Look at the things she did to Kathy and to Ron and to you and Nikki.”

  As her sister talked, Sami replayed her mother’s greatest hits over and over in her mind. She could see everything that had happened with perfect clarity. There was no arguing that their mom probably was the worst person in the world.

  But she’s our mom. The only mom we’ll ever have.

  Sami went silent, and Tori filled the quiet of the space between them.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Sami.”

  Sami held her sister. She was desperate. She knew that everyone’s life would go up in flames if the truth came out. Even so, she’d found a way to navigate her mother’s treachery.

  She hoped Tori could too.

  There were more tears on the drive down to Olympia to meet up with Shelly in the Olive Garden parking lot. The visit that was supposed to be the highlight of the summer had turned into a nightmare with the realization that what had been done to Kathy Loreno had also been done to Ron.

  Before they parked next to their mother’s waiting car, Sami told her sister one last thing.

  “If she says Ron is gone, then that means he’s probably dead.”

  Sami had been crying. Her eyes were red, and it was obvious that their mother noticed it.

  “Everything okay?” Shelly asked.

  Always quick with a joke or a way to deflect, Sami answered right away. “Yeah,” she said. “Just so hard to say goodbye to my little sister.”

  The sisters hugged and cried together while Shelly watched from the driver’s side of her car. It was a long, painful goodbye. Finally, they detached, and Tori got into the car.

  Shelly started the car. “What was that all about, Tori?” she asked as she put it in gear for the drive back to Raymond.

  “Just a great weekend. Going to miss her.”

  Shelly probed a little and Tori told her she didn’t feel well.

  “I have a bad headache, Mom.” She leaned her head against the glass of the passenger window and closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep.

>   I don’t want to talk to you, she thought.

  When they pulled up into the driveway at Monohon Landing, it felt like a foreign land. Tori had only been gone a few days, yet in her mind, this already wasn’t her home anymore. It wasn’t a place she even understood. Everything looked and felt weird.

  “Ron got a job,” her mom said.

  Tori knew it was a lie.

  Ron’s dead.

  While her mother had been mostly quiet on the drive, she let a harshness creep into her voice when she told Tori to feed the dogs. Her tone was the opposite of her sisters’.

  It was cold.

  Mean.

  Cross.

  Tori went and did what she’d been told to do. Inside, she felt sick and scared. Her world was turned upside down. But she wasn’t alone. She had her two sisters. They loved her, and they knew what kind of a monster their mother truly was. That, more than anything, emboldened her. It made her want to go to the authorities and tell them everything.

  Yet Sami had urged her to wait. Tori understood where Sami was coming from. She also knew that if there was a price to pay, she would be the one stuck with the bill. It wasn’t the punishments that frightened her. She’d survived just fine up to that point. What worried her was the idea that the reunion with her big sister would be only a one-time thing.

  “I knew that if I didn’t say anything,” she said later, “I might not get to see Nikki anymore.”

  That wasn’t acceptable to Tori. Not at all. She wasn’t going to lose her big sister a second time.

  Going to the police wasn’t only about making her mother pay. It wasn’t even vengeance. It was her way of stopping all the madness so she could be with her sisters again.

  Shelly studied her daughter, her eyes scanning Tori from top to bottom. It wasn’t a gaze of interest or the look of love for a daughter who had been missed around the house for a few days. Shelly had the eyes of an apex predator. She had a way of sizing people up.