Sex. Murder. Mystery. (57 page)

Who had been in control of the relationship? For those who bothered to consider the tiny note, a different scenario was possible. Vili Fualaau was in charge. Other missives and writings indicated that Vili called Mary when he wanted sex. He
allowed
her to see him when it was convenient and didn't interfere with hanging out with his buddies or the young girls he preferred.

Mary Kay had wanted love and attention. She could only have Vili's attention when
he
gave
his
permission.

In another note she wrote:

“
I see and feel you wanting me to fill in for the sex you're not getting from your school girlfriends. That's not why I'm in your life. Don't call me ever to be a fill in
.”

She was functioning like a junior high girl writing lists and making plans for a fairy-tale future. They were a reincarnated love. She worried about getting his mother's permission to see him; her parents' support when she needed it. She was a girl in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. A favorite song asked the question:

“How could it be wrong, if it feels so right?”

Rumors percolated through the Shorewood neighborhood that something bad was brewing at the elementary school. Real bad. A teacher there was in big trouble. Word around the area was that soon “everyone was going to know some shocking news.”

Danelle Johnson didn't need anyone to tell her who was in trouble.

“God, I know it is going to be Mary Letourneau. I just know it,” she told her husband. “All those seventh-graders going down there. It's gonna be her.”

As the hours ticked closer to the disclosure of “something big breaking at Shorewood” Danelle saw something in her son that suggested he knew a bit more about what might be happening.

She remembered later a time just before the news broke when her son, Drew, was out in the yard sobbing uncontrollably. It was as if his heart had been thrashed. He refused to say what it was that was hurting him so. After much prodding from his mother, Drew finally gave a lame excuse that some girl had dumped him.

Then they all learned what so many had suspected. It was Mary and Vili.

Danelle was dazed—not that it was Mary, but that it was Vili. She loved Soona Fualaau's son. He was a wonderful and talented boy. But she couldn't fathom what people were saying Mary Letourneau had done.

“I just couldn't imagine a grown woman having an affair with him. I couldn't even imagine the concept of what she could have possibly been thinking.”

There's a little break area on the ramp at SeaTac International Airport where Alaska Air employees can escape the wintry chill of the tarmac and catch a cup of coffee—Starbucks, of course—and share the latest in passenger horror stories and, if there was any, a little airport gossip. If anyone had heard what was happening at the Letourneau house in Normandy Park, they kept it to themselves. It was so ugly that no one dared bring it up.

Finally, Steve Letourneau approached some employees shortly after he had been contacted by Pat Maley of the King County Police.

Usually a somewhat affable presence, Steve was apparently upset about something and wanted to talk. Joe Bendix, the flight attendant and former neighbor from Carriage Row condominiums later described him as “just heartbroken and freaking out.”

The look in his eyes telegraphed that he was in great pain.

“I want to tell you something before you read about it in the paper,” Steve said, choosing his words carefully. “Mary's been having an affair with one of her students.”

“Oh, well, you know things happen,” Joe said. While he heard the word “student” he hadn't considered the idea of age. In his mind, he thought that the affair involved a young man, maybe one she had taught who was now in high school or maybe even older. Mary had been teaching for some time and it was possible, Joe Bendix thought, that the student was nearly grown. “Student” didn't mean a child.

Steve was taken aback. Embarrassed as he seemed, it was clear that his message wasn't getting through to Joe.

“This kid is like a year older than Steven,” he said, to hammer the point home. “She was arrested for having sex with one of her students.”

Joe didn't know how to respond. He said he was sorry and he hoped everything would be all right. Though Steve hadn't said anything about the depth or duration of the affair, Joe concluded that it had been a fling, a one-time transgression. A fluke.

“Things will work out,” he said. “Things will be okay.”

Later when Joe told Fran what he had heard, the two of them could make no headway in understanding what Steve had disclosed and what they would later read in their newspaper. Fran had never really cared for Mary Kay. She thought she was snooty. So Steve's revelations naturally brought forth some disdain and, very surprisingly to Fran, a measure of unexpected sympathy.

She didn't think what Mary had done was okay by any stretch.

“Even if you are unhappy with your spouse it's not grounds for having a relationship with a child—even if you think you might be in love with him. Or are you just grasping for attention? I really think she has a problem,” Fran said.

Her husband didn't disagree. And while neither of the Letourneaus' flight-attendant former neighbors knew what was going to happen with what they had once considered “the perfect family,” they hoped Steve would get custody of the four children.

The thought of the children brought a bittersweet smile.

“There's no doubt in my mind that Steve loves all of them. I think he was probably the most perfect father you could get. He doted over those kids and was proud of them,” Joe said.

Chapter 36

NONE COULD HAVE prepared for the emotions that the letter from the Highline School District would bring when children from Shorewood brought home word from the superintendent regarding allegations against Mary Letourneau. While many kids were teary and confused about what was going on, it was the reaction of the parents that brought the greatest wave of emotions. Lyle Mattson stood apart from many classmates. He was nonplussed about the whole thing. He merely had an apology for his mother when he handed her the envelope. He quietly announced it was about Mrs. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

“I should have told you sooner,” he said. “It was kind of disgusting, so I didn't want to say anything.”

Tandy Mattson studied the contents of the letter.

“Did she ever do anything to you?” she finally asked her son, who had transferred into room 39 after Christmas.

“No.”

“Okay,” she said.

The age difference between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau did indeed disturb Tandy Mattson, but she had a hard time seeing what happened between teacher and student as a terrible crime. It wasn't as though such things hadn't happened before. Tandy had known of teacher-and-student flings from her own days as a teenager. It wasn't out there in the open, but it was known.

“When I was in high school I knew plenty of girls messing with the football coach,” she reminded her husband.

Nick Mattson had a different take. He didn't buy that kind of thirty-something justification. He also refused to see what had transpired as a love story or a “mistake,” and because of their stubborn positions he and Tandy went round and round about it.

“It's child rape,” Nick said as his wife reached over to hit the “mute” button on their giant television set. “The boy is a child. I don't care if it was a woman molesting a boy or an older guy molesting young girls. She's a sick woman.”

Tandy didn't feel that way at all. She thought that it was within the realm of possibility, maybe even probability, that Mary and Vili loved each other.

“But,” she conceded while her husband held to his hard line, “it may be puppy love, though. And I can't say it was his first time. I heard he's in a gang.”

Danelle Johnson's twins were among those who just couldn't see that anything that happened between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau was wrong. Vili was a gentle soul, an artist. Mary was the beautiful and wise love of his life. For Danelle, there was no getting through to her son and daughter. It was a love affair, not a crime.

“Whatever illness she's got, she's got a pretty good illness,” she said later. “She actually convinced him, and them too, that she was in love with him. Then when they got in her way of using him—even though I don't think she thought she was using him—then she started turning on them, trying to get rid of them so they wouldn't be in her way.”

Drew told his mother that she was wrong. He knew that Vili was in love, but Danelle dismissed the idea.

“He's too young to decide what he wants. And she's of an age where she should know that even if she did want it she should wait.”

Not everyone was mortified, disgusted, or outraged when word went beyond Shorewood school grounds that Mary Letourneau and her former sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau had been having sexual relations.

Katie Hogden nearly jumped out of her skin with joy when the first layers of secrecy began to peel away. The dark-haired teen with braces, the budding writer, the girl who never had a cross word for anyone, responded with euphoria.

Oh, my gosh! she thought. Two of my closest friends have found each other. That's so cool
.

The idea that there might be dire consequences didn't hit her,

“The age thing didn't click,” she said later. “When you hear that your friends are starting a relationship and they have liked each other for so long… they are just perfect for each other.”

To Katie, it was beautiful, right, and romantic. It wasn't until she saw the news reports that cast it as a crime that she could acknowledge that it might have been wrong.

It had been a year and a half since Kate Stewart had seen Mary Kay Letourneau. The break in their face-to-face contact had been the longest since their friendship started at Arizona State in 1982, but it was not an estrangement. Both chalked up the lapse to marriages, careers, but mostly to the responsibilities of running households with small children. Mary Kay and Steve had four children, and Kate and her doctor husband were right behind them with a son and two daughters.

When a friend considered moving to Seattle, Kate suggested looking up Mary Kay for the scoop on the city's neighborhoods and schools. When the woman returned to Chicago, she told Kate that she had better call Mary Kay. There was urgency to her suggestion.

“Your friend is in trouble,” she said. “She's about to break.”

Kate suspected marital problems and, frankly, wasn't all that concerned if that was the cause. Mary Kay could get past that, and, Kate thought, it was certainly high time for a divorce.

“How are you?” she asked over the phone.

“We-ell.” Mary Kay hesitated, drawing out the one-syllable word to two. “There's a lot going on.”

“What's going on? You're getting divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, so.”

We've all been waiting for this, Kate thought, without saying it. Is there someone? I hope there is someone! Now maybe you can love someone
.

“Yes, there is someone,” Mary Kay said softly.

“That's great”

“And I'm pregnant,” she said.

“Well, you said there was someone. So what!”

Kate learned nothing about the other someone, though she understood he was a wonderful person, and younger than Mary Kay. But as she had when she first told Michelle about it, Mary Kay did not let on just how much younger her beau was.

Kate, of course, would learn more in the weeks and months to come and she would consider why Mary Kay couldn't come out and tell her friends what had been going on and with whom.

“It was too much for her,” she said later. “I think there was a shame factor there—religion hassles, which I don't think she's come to terms with. She's got this divider, one side, she's devout and believes in God, wants to do the right thing. The other side of her says, 'There's nothing wrong with having fun. God wants me to have fun. God wants me to live life, and damn it, I've embraced that.' “

The police had been by to make sure no other children had been molested by their favorite teacher; the school made offers of crisis counseling for those who needed it. And, of course, the media was sniffing around. As for Vili Fualaau, he was still in class at Cascade Middle School. Shorewood music teacher Beth Adair wrote a note to Mary Kay describing how Vili was: “spaced out and subdued.”

Chapter 37

HANGING OUT AT a friend's house in Kent on a rainy Friday evening, February 28, 1997, Amber Fish answered an urgent page from her older sister, Lisa.

“Amber, did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Get a hold of Angie quick!”

“
What news?
”

Lisa didn't want to say and instructed her sister to call their mother and she would fill her in. Amber hung up and dialed. Joy Fish answered and told her that a teacher had been arrested for molesting a student.

“On Channel Four they're saying it's Mary Kay.”

Amber got into her car and drove to another friend's house where Angie was visiting. The twins and their friend watched the news report on the local late news. In shock and full of disbelief, Amber and Angie realized there was only one thing to do: they drove to Normandy Park to see Mary Kay. They knew it was late and that all hell had broken out, but Mary Kay was their friend and they wanted to support her.

Something's not right here. There has to be a mistake, Angie thought
.

Amber said it out loud.

“It's just allegations. It was some kid just making this up.
Mary Kay?
I'm just sure.”

Angie agreed.

“Not Mary Kay.”

Just as the Fish twins, then just nineteen, turned into the driveway, the Letourneaus' '94 Plymouth Voyager pulled in ahead of them. The driver didn't get out right away and just sat there. The girls thought it was Mary Kay and got out and approached the driver's side.

Mary Kay kept facing straight ahead, until Amber got her attention, and in an instant a look of surprise and exaggerated delight washed over her face.

“Girls!” she said, getting out of the car and hugging them, first Amber, then Angie, who lingered a bit behind her sister.