Sex. Murder. Mystery. (52 page)

“Well,” Mary Kay explained, shrugging it off, “it's so nice that he's doing me a favor that I don't want to say anything about it.”

Mary Kay and the Fish twins from the Kent condominium renewed their friendship and talked on the phone more than they had in the past year. Topics always ricocheted with Mary Kay—“What did you have for dinner?” would turn into what
she
had had for dinner three weeks ago and every day since. But one subject all enjoyed discussing was the world of art. Mary Kay was especially pleased that both Amber and Angie had enrolled in the Seattle Art Institute. Amber was majoring in music and promotion and Angie was aiming for a career in video/film editing. Mary Kay recalled the fantastic job the girls had done on their high school video yearbook. She had spotted their talent back then. And, she told them, she had a new protégé of sorts.

“Yeah,” she said, “I have this friend from school that I'd like to get into the Art Institute or Cornish.” She went on to explain how talented her friend was and how she was even taking art classes with him at Highline Community College and at Daniel Smith, a Seattle art store, to support his dreams. The future for the student/friend was unlimited.

Amber and Angie talked about it later. They were amazed by Mary Kay's dedication.

“I knew she didn't have enough time for her family and school, and here she was taking classes with this student,” Angie said. “What kind of teacher goes to classes with her student?”

Angie later remembered calling Mary Kay in July 1996 to arrange for a visit.

“We wanted to see them. It was almost an excitement when she would hear from us. 'Oh, hello! We want to see you!' It was a thrill for us because we loved the family. I would usually make Amber call; I hated calling because I didn't want to get stuck on the phone with her for an hour. She just wouldn't shut up. She'd talk about everything and anything.”

The girls took Steven, eleven, Mary Claire, nine, and Nicky, almost five, to the Burien Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. They left toddler Jackie with her mother at home. It was a good time,
like the old times.
Mary Claire chattered on about anything and everything and Steven was excited about Amber's new Ford Escort.

“He was just getting into music and he really liked the new stereo,” Amber recalled.

The following month, Mary Kay called and arranged for her two youngest children to be baby-sat by Amber and Angie at Carriage Row.

As the twins entertained the children they asked what their parents had been up to.

“Daddy doesn't like the brown boy who smokes,” Nicky said. “Mommy and Daddy fight about the brown boy.”

Amber and Angie didn't know what to make of the remark. They asked if the “brown boy” was their regular baby-sitter.

Nicky said no.

“Why are they fighting?”

The little boy said he didn't know, and the girls just dropped it.

Chapter 27

AND AS THE days went on during the summer of 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau and her now-thirteen-year-old protégé, Vili Fualaau, seemed inseparable. Vili's brother filled in as a baby-sitter when teacher and student took art classes, went to art supply stores, and visited galleries in Seattle. As a mother, Mary Kay had never been the type to hang out around the house and vacuum; she was always coordinating some activity. But that summer those activities always involved Vili.

When Mary Claire was invited to a slumber party with assorted cousins at Grandmother Nadine's in Puyallup, Mary Kay said she was so swamped she wasn't certain she would have time to get her there. She was running here and there, one appointment after the next. Classes to attend. Shopping to take care of. To make matters even more difficult, the day Nadine wanted Mary Claire down in Puyallup was the same day mother and daughter were planning on heading up to Anchorage to join the rest of her children and her husband who were already up there visiting. Mary Kay altered her plans, and made arrangements to go as far as Auburn to meet one of Steve's aunts in a kind of relay race. The aunt agreed to take the little girl down to Nadine's for the slumber party.

When she arrived in Auburn, she not only had Mary Claire with her, but she also had Vili Fualaau along for the ride. She said she was going to fly up to Anchorage that afternoon, on a 4 P.M. flight. The women picking up Mary Claire thought it was strange that Mary Kay had the Samoan boy with her, and mentioned it to Nadine.

“Why did she have that boy with her?” Nadine wondered.

Sharon Hume called her mother the next day. Mary Kay hadn't made the 4 P.M. flight after all, she arrived five hours later than planned. But there was more. She was troubled by something else.

“Mother, she brought this kid, Vili, with her. This kid that she's supposedly teaching art and everything to.”

“What?” Nadine asked. “She had him with her when she dropped off Mary Claire, but she didn't say anything about bringing him to Alaska.”

Sharon, who was audibly upset, told her mother that something else was curious. When they arrived at the Letourneaus' Anchorage restaurant, Mary Kay asked Dick Letourneau for the keys to his new truck. She said she “wanted to show Vili the stars. They were gone for hours.”

What was going on? Mary Kay had left her kids, tired and cranky, at the restaurant for hours? What was she thinking? What was she doing? And all the while when they were in Alaska, Mary kept singing Vili's praises to Steve's family.

Nadine later recalled how her daughter Sharon felt about the thirteen-year-old.

“They didn't like Vili. They thought he was illiterate. Also she [Mary] kept saying, 'Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he something else?' Sharon thought, 'What is there about this kid that I'm supposed to think is so wonderful?' ”

Later, Nadine couldn't shake off the idea that so much had been going on right under Steve's nose. Right under everyone's noses. In Normandy Park, and in Alaska, too.

“She sat up til four A.M. holding his hand on the davenport downstairs. Steven was in the bedroom. It blows your mind. It was like Steven was hypnotized,” she said.

Other incidents raised an eyebrow or two among Steve's family. One family member was puzzled by Mary Kay's behavior at the last family gathering she attended. It was a wedding reception. She never once spoke to any adults. She was always hovering around the kids' table, conversing and playing with them as though they were her peer group. It was very peculiar and not like Mary Kay at all. Sure, she was attentive to her children, but she liked to be noticed and praised for her lovely outfits by the adults, too.

That night she was a child, too.

When Mary Kay and Vili returned to Seattle they brought with them some art photographs of a pair of puffins nuzzling each other.

“They mate for life, you know,” Mary Kay told a friend.

If Mary Kay Letourneau lived for the telephone and its link to the world outside her Normandy Park home, one of her favorite people to converse with was Michelle Jarvis. That had been true when they were teenagers and had continued into adulthood. A four-hour marathon was nothing out of the ordinary; and both women had phone bills to prove it. One particular phone call in late September 1996, however, had been on Michelle's dime. The childhood friend and mother of three hadn't heard from Mary Kay for a while, and assumed that her long distance service had been discontinued for lack of payment—a common occurrence.

They got on the phone at ten and didn't hang up until after 2 A.M.—on a day both had to work. Mary never needed as much sleep, but Michelle could always feel the residual drag the next day after an all-nighter with Mary Kay. Much of their conversation that night centered around Vili Fualaau, whom Mary Kay considered a particularly gifted student. She said she had realized his potential when she taught him in second grade and the ensuing years only verified his artistic ability. Mary Kay said she wanted to help develop his talent. They discussed everything from showing the boy's artwork in a gallery exhibition for students to finding a mentor among the local artists who lived in the area.

This is great, Michelle thought at the time. She's got this child that she recognizes this incredible talent in. What an awesome person she is for caring so much
…

Mary Kay had always been interested in her students. But Michelle had never heard such extreme concern for and awareness of a particular individual. From what she gathered, Vili Fualaau seemed deserving of the interest. Mary Kay described him as boy from a troubled home, being raised by a single mother in poverty with a father in prison. His prospects were bleak and she saw his future in his art. Her help could be his ticket out of poverty, she said.

“It is ironic,” Michael Jarvis, Michelle's husband, said later. “It
was
his ticket out of poverty. Not how she planned it. Not what she had in mind.”

In October, Mary Kay called Michelle now living in Costa Mesa to tell her that she had fallen in love. In fact, she was in love like she had never been in love before. She practically gushed into the phone, spewing out adjectives and descriptions of the most wonderful person in the world. He was the person that she had been searching for her entire life. She was not going to settle for a life without love anymore. She'd found the perfect love. There hadn't been any sex, but they were considering it.

“He's so wonderful. We talk about everything. He's my soul mate… ”

Oddly, for a woman who showed no compunction about sharing intimate aspects of her love life when she and Michelle were teenagers, Mary Kay didn't provide many concrete details about the wonderful new guy in her life. She offered nothing about his job or his social status. Not even the subject of his ever-important appearance was broached. Nothing much beyond the fact that he was wonderful and she was in love.

“She told me he was a student and she had a class with him over the summer,” Michelle recalled. “I was thinking he was a student in college that she had met through taking this class. So without coming right out and saying who he was, she led me to believe that he was a college student. In my mind I was thinking he was about twenty or so,” she said later. “But she never really said an age.”

But she was so happy that Michelle didn't pry.

I wonder what took her so long to find someone to love? she thought
.

A few weeks later, more news came in another phone call from Mary Kay.

“I'm pregnant,” she said, “and it's not Steve's.”

Michelle didn't condemn. She was happy about it. Mary Kay seemed overjoyed and after all the years with Steve she certainly was entitled to some shred of joy. Mary Kay said that the father was the same person, the student, she had fallen in love with over the summer. Of course, there would be no abortion. She was going to divorce Steve and have the baby.

“Does Steve know?” Michelle wondered.

“No,” she said, adding that she had recently slept with Steve to buy some time while she figured out what she was going to do. There was no love lost between them and getting him into bed hadn't been easy, but the mission was accomplished. Intercourse had allowed the
possibility
that the baby was her husband's.

Michelle didn't fault her childhood friend for the deception.

“Will Steve believe that it's his baby?” she asked.

Mary Kay doubted it. “The baby will have black hair,” she said.

At that point, Mary Kay said she was biding her time. Things were tense enough and adding a baby from her affair to the mix would be trouble. Steve was agitated and suspicious enough.

“Mary Kay, I'm very afraid for you,” Michelle said. “I'm afraid of how he will react to this.”

Her friend told her not to worry. Cake was sure she could handle it.

* * *

Whatever was going on at the Letourneaus' house had to be pretty bad. Scott Douglas came home very upset one afternoon and told his mother that Steven's parents were not going to have a party for his twelfth birthday. Ellen Douglas wasted no time in telling her son that they'd celebrate his friend's birthday by inviting Steven over for pizza and videos. The words ran through her mind: “Just because your family is falling apart, doesn't mean your friends don't love you.”

Later Steve Letourneau talked with Ellen and the subject of the stress in his family came up. Steve said that big trouble had, in fact, been in the offing for a while. He refused to elaborate.

“I can't tell you now. But you're not going to believe it.”

Ellen didn't push, though the grade-school teacher was certainly intrigued.

Don't give me a little bit of the story…. it's like licking the spoon without eating the cookie, she thought later
.

Chapter 28

GRANDMA NADINE KNEW that something was up with her grandson and his wife, but she had no idea how bad it would get. No marriage was perfect and the rumblings she'd heard about Steve and Mary Kay seemed like more of the same. Instead of brooding about something over which she had no control, she looked forward to filling her mobile home with children and grandchildren for the holidays. Holidays, she knew, were stressful enough without worrying about someone else's marriage.

But all of that was put on hold when she answered the phone one evening. It was her daughter Sharon, in Alaska. Her voice was ragged and her words constricted. She was upset. Nadine could tell something bad was coming. It was about Mary Kay.

“Everything I suspected is true,” Sharon said, finally diving into the reason for her call. “She's having an affair with that thirteen-year-old.”

Nadine sat down on the sofa up against row after row of family pictures. Steve and Mary Kay. Mary Kay and the children. Every combination of every member in the family. All of the beautiful blond-headed kids smiling wide and sweetly. The faces stared down on her as she spoke to her daughter.

“And she's pregnant.”

She could barely believe her ears.

“You've got to be kidding me,” was all Nadine could come up with.

“No. Steven has all the proof in the world.”

Nadine's blood boiled. “I'm glad for that,” the older woman said, surprised at her daughter's disclosure, but not shocked. It was a strange feeling. Although the words were outrageous, she believed Mary Kay was capable of such an act.