If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(6)

Instead, she seemed happy to have tossed a grenade into the circle of her family, and to have received the attention she craved because of it.

Shelly wanted to return to Battle Ground High School, but administrators declined to take her back.

“You burned that bridge,” the principal said. Shelly sat blank eyed in his office while Les and Lara looked on. “We don’t want you in class here. We just don’t want any more trouble.”

Hearing that, the Watsons were beside themselves. Shelly was only fifteen. She had to go to school. Lara immediately tried to get her enrolled in Annie Wright, a prestigious and expensive boarding school in Tacoma, but that was a no-go too.

“They researched her,” Lara recalled later. “They turned her down flat.”

While the Watsons made a good income, the truth was they’d have paid just about anything to get Shelly out of Battle Ground and into a classroom somewhere. Anywhere. Eventually, they found a spot for Shelly in Hoodsport, Washington, living with Lara’s parents, who quickly learned to walk on eggshells around the teenager. No one wanted to set Shelly off. There simply was no telling what she would do next. She was volatile, unpredictable. She had a mean streak that was sometimes hidden by a pretense of caring about someone or something. For instance, she’d volunteer to help Lara’s mother with the dishes, but would end up throwing the unwashed utensils, plates, and even pots and pans into the garbage. When she was in a more productive mood, she would wipe the plates “clean” with a cloth instead of washing them.

Shelly said she loved kids and wanted to babysit for the neighbors. Even better, she loved babysitting so much, she said, she even volunteered to watch them for free. She seemed to enjoy being seen as a benevolent, caring girl. It was an affectation that didn’t last long. When the parents came home from a night out, they found their children in bed with clothes still on and tales of how Shelly had barricaded them in their rooms with heavy furniture.

Shelly also turned on her grandparents after only a few weeks under their roof.

“With all their grandchildren, my mom and dad never had a problem,” Lara said, looking back many years after Shelly returned to Battle Ground. “I found out later that my parents were so glad when school finally finished and they could send Shelly home.” Shelly had apparently also accused Lara’s father of abuse. “I learned that Shelly actually told the neighbors that her grandpa was messing with her. And they contacted my mother immediately.” It was baffling to Lara. “I don’t understand Shelly’s constant need to try to ruin people’s lives.”





CHAPTER FIVE

Lara Watson would sometimes brace herself at the sound of the phone’s grating ring, dreading another call about something Shelly had done, something new to test Lara’s resolve to make things work. Lara was capable. She was good with people. She had a bright spirit. But even without Shelly at home, the Watsons’ marriage was under unbearable strain. Certainly family businesses required constant attention, and Les was up for the challenge. It was probably what he was best at doing. Lara, for her part, was mired in the quicksand of raising five children, two of her own with Les and the three from his ex-wife, Sharon. The older children continued to wreak havoc on the household, though none to the degree that Shelly did. Chuck was mostly quiet—timid, even. Lara would have him sit on her lap while she read to him and listened to him pretend to read to her. Whenever he tried to speak, Shelly was right there answering for him. School was difficult for him too. For his part, Paul was a habitual liar, like his older sister. While Shelly controlled Paul, Paul, in turn, mimicked his sister and tried to control Chuck. It was as if all of the kids had coalesced into a mob, with Shelly as their ultimate leader.

The queen bee.

The one who always knew what was best.

Just like Grandma Anna.

Shelly was always a master of disruption and chaos. It was a foregone conclusion that adding her back in the mix after her exile from Battle Ground was not going to work out for anyone. Lara spent half of that summer on the phone trying to find a school that would enroll Shelly that fall. Every place she called turned her down. Lara was nearly at her wit’s end when she finally got a yes from St. Mary of the Valley in Beaverton, Oregon, about forty minutes south of Battle Ground. It might not have been as far away as Lara hoped, but it was the best of a very short list of options.

She would later admit that she did hold back some about the challenges that would follow Shelly to boarding school, because she was so desperate. She also figured that a bunch of no-nonsense nuns would see right through Shelly’s most obvious manipulations and put a stop to them.

After a few weeks, the sisters started calling to ask the Watsons if they could come and get Shelly for the weekend.

“Friday nights we’d pick her up and take her with us and we go up to our mountain cabin and go skiing. I always tried to do it on weekends, though honestly it was hard. Every weekend I would just grit my teeth. It was so peaceful without her. Even the boys, who had big problems, were doing better.”

It seemed like the more anyone did for Shelly, the more she’d take. If she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d pitch a fit.

“The sisters didn’t want her back the next year,” Lara said. “They told me she had behavior problems.”

The problems were familiar.

According to the sisters, Shelly would often wake up in the middle of the night screaming. She stole another girl’s homework and destroyed it. She was caught stealing things from other girls. Shelly even resurrected an old favorite guerilla tactic: she put broken glass in a classmate’s shoe.