If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(4)

Anna’s husband, George Watson, was the opposite of his wife. He was kind. Sweet. Endearing, even. He was smaller than Anna, standing four inches shorter, and did whatever his wife told him to do. For more than twenty years, Lara recalled, George slept in a small eight-by-eight-foot shed just outside the back door to the kitchen. He never slept in the house, because Anna insisted he stay in the shed.

Not long before Les and Lara married, two women from Western State Hospital, near Tacoma, came to work for Anna at one of the nursing homes the family owned in Battle Ground. While their names were Mary and Pearlie, Lara only ever heard Anna refer to them as her “retards.” She lorded over them as a cruel queen might order around less-favored house servants. There was no task too low for the women to attend to in a nursing facility where there were more than enough such tasks.

From Lara’s perspective, the women were nearly slaves to Anna. At home, Anna made them clean her house, do the dishes, wash the floors. She’d order them to stop whatever task they were engaged in to wash her feet, do her hair. If the women moved too slowly, Anna would punch them, kick them, or pull their hair.

One time when Lara went over to Anna’s to pick up Shelly, she noticed that Mary was upset about something. Pearlie’s hair was wet and wrapped in a towel. Lara asked Mary what was wrong, and she confided that Anna had stormed out of the house with Shelly. She had been so angry about something that she had held Pearlie’s head in the toilet bowl and repeatedly flushed.

Lara was stunned. She’d never heard of such a thing.

“Why would she do something like that?” she asked Mary.

“She does it all the time when she gets mad,” she said.

“They were always afraid of Anna,” Lara said later.

Everyone was.

Everyone, it seemed, but little Shelly.

Lara started working in the nursing home office shortly after Les’s children came to live in Battle Ground. She had wanted to go to college, but those plans had been waylaid by instant motherhood. Since Shelly’s school was next to the nursing home, Shelly would often go to Grandma Anna’s after school instead of taking the bus home. Lara would call to see if she was there, and Anna would seethe that her granddaughter was being neglected and needed to stay with her to have a “proper” meal or be bathed correctly.

“You don’t need to wash her hair, Anna.”

“You don’t do it right. It’s filthy.”

Anna knew what was best for Shelly.

Indeed, she knew what was best for everyone.

Lara held her tongue, a practice she’d come to master over time.

Another time, Lara came to pick Shelly up and found her beautiful red hair all cut off. Grandma Anna stood next to her granddaughter with a pair of scissors and a mean smile.

Lara was shocked. “What happened?”

Grandma Anna snapped at her. “You can’t keep her hair brushed properly, so I cut it!”

It was a cruel, frenzied hack job. It looked awful. Shelly looked demoralized.

“She has very thick hair,” Lara said, fully aware that Shelly was going to blame her for what her grandmother had done. “I brush it every day,” she insisted, glancing at Shelly, who would scream every time a brush came near her.

Grandma Anna made a dismissive face and turned away, sliding her bum leg over the polished wooden floor.

She’d done exactly what she’d wanted to do.

Making people unhappy was her way of having fun.

Lara could see it even then. Shelly and Grandma Anna were inseparable, constant companions. While occasionally her victim, Shelly mainly served the role of protégé in her grandmother’s life. Grandma Anna’s favorite, her shadow, her mimic, was paying close attention to everything she did.

In time, Shelly would reveal just how good a student she’d been.





CHAPTER FOUR

Shelly’s first real strike came when she was almost fifteen. It was a stealth attack, the kind of tactic a practitioner of discord learns is the most effective means to wreak the most damage.

She was a no-show after school in March 1969. While she’d been tardy before, this time felt a little different. She was later than normal. Lara stared at the clock in her spotless kitchen. She drummed her fingertips on the surface of the table.

Where are you, Shelly?

What are you up to?

Who are you with?

Growing anxious, Shelly’s stepmother finally phoned the principal’s office, and what she learned took the air from her lungs. Shelly hadn’t come home because she’d been taken to the juvenile hall detention center in Vancouver. Shelly, a month shy of her fifteenth birthday, had told a counselor that something was going on at home and she couldn’t handle it anymore.

“What are you talking about?” Lara pressed the school employee for additional details. “You need to tell me what’s going on here.”

“I really can’t say anything more,” the woman on the other end of the line said. Her tone was cool. That alarmed Lara even more.

She hung up and immediately phoned her husband, Les, at the nursing home and told him to get home. She was sharp and direct. “Right now,” she said. “Something’s happening with Shelly.”

After another frantic call to juvenile hall, the Watsons were on their way to find out just what had happened at school that afternoon.