Sex. Murder. Mystery. (48 page)

Steven was everything to his mother. Although the twins felt Mary Kay loved all of her children, she was closest to Steven. The Fish girls remembered “Mommy and Steven Days,” when Mary Kay and her son would go out and do things together, while Steve played with Mary Claire. When Steven got a little older, Mary Kay would take him shopping. They'd return from their outings with tired feet and bulging Nordstrom bags.

The twins later talked about the shopping habits of their favorite neighbor.

“She had really expensive tastes—more expensive than anyone I'd ever known—” Amber recalled.

“And that she could not afford,” cut in Angie.

“She was way out of her range,” Amber continued. “She brought home bags and bags from Nordstrom when we knew they could not afford it. Shoes for the kids, a two-hundred-dollar dress for herself.”

Her best friend from her days at Arizona State, Kate Stewart, understood Mary Kay's quandary and her
modus operandi.
So what if she over-shopped? Who didn't max out a credit card from time to time? Kate always considered Mary Kay a “loves life” kind of woman, one who lived each minute to the fullest. She knew what she wanted and went after it with the kind of gusto that few could emulate. And, more than anything, she wanted to be surrounded by people who lived life the same way. That included her friends, her children, and her husband. Mary Kay was a woman who wanted a lot from the world, a woman who
required
a lot out of life. Yet there she was, trapped. Trapped in a dull, mundane existence in a crummy condo in Kent, Washington, with a husband she didn't really love.

Her emotions quietly fraying like blue jeans, Mary Kay deserved more.

BOOK II

Teacher

Mary Letourneau is not only a gift to Shorewood Elementary School, but a gift to the entire Highline School District.

—A teaching colleague quoting the Shorewood principal's last evaluation of the teacher headed for disaster

The school is suffering. The teachers certainly suffered tremendously from this. Teachers walk in those classrooms… [and ask,] “what has this done with my standing in my classroom? Are they [the students] going to worry about me?” It chokes me up to think of the impact on them and the students.

—Gary Roe, grandfather of a Shorewood student

This is not a case questioning our educational system or the delivery of curriculum.

—Mary Kay Letourneau in a press release, November 1997

Before students left, I made sure I gave them a choice of a high-five, handshake, or a hug. H.H.H. I got it from a teacher at Seattle U. and I did it every day with every student since my first second-grade class. It was a way of touching base, ensuring contact.

—Mary Kay Letourneau on a teaching technique, 1999

Chapter 19

IN NEARLY EVERY way, White Center couldn't be farther from Corona del Mar, California.
White Center.
The name is a big joke among Seattlelites who don't live there. Toss a rock, they say, and you couldn't hit a white person if your life depended on it. Nearby Top Hat is another with a moniker that doesn't fit the ambience of the place for which it is named. Those who live there shrug and acknowledge the obvious.

“You'd think a place like Top Hat would be a little classier,” said one resident, aware of the irony.

Though White Center's name is a joke, its nickname is worse. The slogan the chamber of commerce would like to forget is Rat City, from an infestation that local boosters claim has been annihilated, although most know rodents rule the basements and back bedrooms of some of the Seattle area's worst housing. The projects appear tidy and nondescript, and some think they are a cut above some housing in Vili's neighborhood, a world of jacked-up cars, liquor bottles, and water-stained curtains. This is not Compton or Watts, but it is Seattle's version of the hood. Rap and hip-hop pulse in headsets and from boom boxes. Country, Top 40 radio,
classical,
be damned.

If other Seattle neighborhoods are more defined by money, cars, and lawn services, White Center is defined by the people and cultures that claim it. Cambodians, Russians, Samoans, and African-Americans run the restaurants, go to the storefront churches, and their children stake out the Taco Time and Dairy Queen on Ambaum Boulevard. When drizzle doesn't send them for cover, some kids hang around the shores of a pond behind Evergreen High School where drug use is so common deals are done in the light of day.

This is the neighborhood of a boy who would be the catalyst for unbelievable change and dire consequences for Mary Kay Letourneau. This is the neighborhood that would become the home of her youngest children.

Enrollment at the Highline School District had declined since the 1970s. After Boeing went nearly bankrupt and laid off most of its workforce (“Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?” read a famous billboard) enrollment dropped from 40,000 to just less than half that in the mid-1990s. Perhaps understandably so, those who were left behind to hold down the fort at Burien and White Center in many cases could not afford to move elsewhere. To the south of the Highline School District boundary in Des Moines and Normandy Park and north to Shorewood and Seahurst, however, are the Gold Coast homes of the more affluent.

“This is the land that time forgot,” said Nick Latham, public relations flack for the district. “Progress jumped over the area and not much has changed.” When the former television reporter first came to work for the district one aspect fascinated him above many others: the people who lived in the area
never
left it. White Center, Burien, Roxbury—whatever the address, it was their town.

“They are living within minutes of one of the most vital, exciting cities in the country, if not the world, and they may never, ever come here. It might as well be New York City. Nothing in Seattle interests them. They do not cross that First Avenue South Bridge.”

In the center of the district is SeaTac International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, and the source of many jobs and, without a doubt, the starting point for nearly all who live in the area. But it is more than that. Ironically, the airport is the area's biggest impediment to communication and traffic. It is also noisy. And as the airport has grown, nearby property values have plummeted and people have departed for quieter environs to the north or east.

For those coming and going, the airport is conveniently located between Seattle and Tacoma. For those who live close by—especially directly in its flight path—it is a disaster. Some schools have been so impacted by the noise that teachers have to stop lessons to wait for passing planes to go by. Families have turned up the volume on their televisions to ear-splitting decibels and learned to live with it.

The Port of Seattle is public enemy number one in those neighborhoods, filled with people who are tired of the promises for noise abatement and the reminder that they “knew what they were getting into when they moved there.” The truth is, many didn't know. Airport traffic has grown steadily over the past quarter century and many of those complaining have been doing so for years.

Nick Latham saw the impact the airport had on the people of the Highline School District. The Port of Seattle, he said, was to blame.

“My allegiance has changed since I took the job down there. So much power. They [the politicians] don't care about the communities, and they don't care about our kids. Should they have to suffer?”

If White Center and the surrounding areas seem a bit hopeless, despite a proliferation of the glitzy-cheap signs of fast food franchises, Burien has retained its small-town feel. It even has a feed store. Like most of suburbia, it isn't a pretty place, but it is home to thousands who sleep there at night and drive to jobs in Seattle or farther out. In her early years at the district, Mary Kay Letourneau did a reverse commute. In the fall of 1989, she came from outside the community to teach second grade in room 20 at Shorewood Elementary. She was admired and loved by nearly everyone in those early years. Her energy was unequaled; her ability to reach into a child's soul to pull out the dreams that she could foster was a gift. There wasn't a parent who didn't want their child in her class; there wasn't a little girl who didn't want to be just like the pretty teacher with the somewhat spiky, gelled hair.
Hip hair.

Patricia Watson was Mary Letourneau's principal for four of the teacher's first five years at Shorewood. She considered Mary Kay to be one of her top teachers, a nurturing presence in the classroom where some students needed that kind of caring in addition to their lessons. Mary was the type of teacher who looked for the best way to reach a student and she would make the effort to find the way.

She was also an excellent mother. Patricia would never forget the day Mary Kay brought her son and daughter to the office to meet her. Mary Kay was so proud of them. And it showed. Steven and Mary Claire were groomed to perfection; shoes shined, hair combed and parted. Over the course of several years, the Letourneau children would frequently come to Shorewood to wait for their mother. Steve would drop them off to be with Mary Kay, and they ended up in the principal's office coloring pictures.

“I still have some of the little treasures they made me,” Patricia said later.

Chapter 20

BY 1992, MARY Kay Letourneau had really wanted to sell the condo. She wanted to live in Normandy Park, one of the south-end-of-Seattle's more exclusive areas. She and the children had found the dream home when out on a drive before mass at St. Philamena, the Des Moines Catholic church the family attended and where the older two children attended school. It was on a quiet street that looped around to commanding views of Puget Sound, Vashon Island, and the Des Moines marina. The 1960s-era olive-green house didn't have a view of the sound, but it was on the edge of a lovely, wooded ravine. At the condo, Mary Kay organized their belongings into boxes, cleaned like a fiend, printed five hundred flyers, and served lasagna dinners to real estate agents. When the unit sold, she was elated. The family was moving up. But even so, Mary Kay emphasized to the Fish twins that although the new residence might have a better address than the condo in Kent, the house itself was nearly a fixer-upper. It also tested their budget, already strained beyond repair. Even with the proceeds from the sale of the condo, some of the down payment was coming from Steve's family, Mary Kay told the girls.

“It's going to be tight for a while,” she said cheerfully. “And it will be a long time before we can fix it up, but it's going to happen.”

As she spoke of the move she was upbeat, animated, and very excited. So much so, that Amber and Angie didn't want to reveal their own sadness. The Letourneaus were their dream family. Little Nicky was “their” baby. Steven. Mary Claire. All of them had meant so much.

The Letourneaus promised the twins they could continue baby-sitting. Steve said he'd take care of driving them back and forth from Kent to Normandy Park. It made the girls feel as though it wasn't over between them, really. Mary Kay continued to do her part in keeping the relationship alive. She phoned Amber and Angie more often than either phoned her. Sometimes she called when she needed a sitter. Other times she dialed their number when she only wanted to chat.

Despite the warnings that the place needed a handyman's touch, the house surprised Angie and Amber.

“I thought it was going to be a lot nicer,” Amber later said.

Angie, as usual, was more direct.

“It wasn't even built right. The front door was on the wrong side of the house.”

If the house in Normandy Park was meant to bring happiness to the Letourneau family, Amber and Angie Fish wondered if it had been a flop. Even as teenagers, the girls could see that both Mary Kay and Steve were more harried and pressed for time than ever.

“Steve didn't seem happy,” Amber said later. “In the condo he did seem happier. In the house he was more cold, withdrawn.”

Mary Kay was working longer hours then, too. And though the sisters kept up with her on the phone, they didn't see her much. The days of hanging out were over and Amber and Angie missed them terribly. Whenever Mary Kay called out of desperation for a sitter, Amber or Angie—or both—would come right over. They spent the night a few times at the Letourneaus' new place, but by the following year, those kinds of visits had dropped off. Even so, they kept in touch by taking the kids out for ice cream or McDonald's every four months or so.

The little enclave of forty-some homes that made up the Letourneaus' Normandy Park neighborhood was a surprisingly tight group, even in the days of whirlwind careers and ever-evaporating time. What brought much of the cohesiveness was the network of children, and the connection they gave to the adults who raised them. Ellen and Daniel Douglas had two children, Scott and Jennifer, the same ages as Mary and Steve Letourneau's two oldest. So it was inevitable that the Douglas family would get to know the Letourneaus, though they lived at opposite ends of the neighborhood.

That Mary Kay and both Daniel and Ellen Douglas were teachers was merely a bonus. The children were always the primary connection. And while the kids shared many similarities, there was one difference. The Letourneaus were enrolled in Catholic school at St. Philomena and the Douglas kids went to public school in the Highline District where all three teachers taught.

“I'm not sure why they did it. Maybe they wanted the stricter values of the church? Ironic, isn't it?” Ellen asked later.

The Douglas home was on a stunning piece of view property once owned by Ellen's grandmother. At one time Ellen's older brother and his childhood buddy, lawyer David Gehrke, rented the little house. Years later, when the grandmother died, the property was divided and the north half sold to the Gehrkes for a much-dreamed-about home that he would build one day—“when the money comes in.”

In time the four children were inseparable. There were lessons together, bicycle rides, trips to the grungy shores of Puget Sound, and for Scott, Little League baseball with Steve Letourneau as coach.