Sex. Murder. Mystery. (65 page)

Ellen would never forget how excited ten-year-old Mary Claire had been on the phone because she and her siblings were going to Washington, D.C., to go to school—and they were leaving right away. They'd be living with their Aunt Liz. After school was let out, they'd be visiting other relatives, including their father's in Alaska.

I'm sure this is cool, Ellen thought as she listened to Mary Claire burble on about the new school without a clue about what was to come, but there's something going on that you haven't allowed to sink in. Life as you know it is falling apart…

Ellen's daughter, Jennifer, didn't get it completely, either. When Audrey was born the little girl asked her mother if they could go see the baby. Ellen knew it was important for Jennifer to see Audrey because the infant was her daughter's best friend's new baby sister. The difficulty for Ellen was the fact that she was a schoolteacher in the Highline District and she saw the pain that had resulted there—because of Mary Kay's relationship with her former student.

Concern for her daughter won out. Ellen picked out a lovely little outfit as a baby gift and the pair went down the street.

Cradling her newborn, Mary Kay welcomed mother and daughter inside. The house was eerie in its emptiness. Boxes and cartons bordered walls smudged by children who no longer lived there. A child's easel and plastic pool had been left behind in the carport. Talk centered on the baby's delivery with no mention of the disintegrating family or the acts that caused it.

“We knew someone was there,” Ellen said later, “because she was not allowed to be alone. That was what the law said. She told us that it was her friend from California. We never saw the person. We were there twice. She said her friend was sleeping. The other time the shower was running the whole time we were there.”

Ellen later wondered if Mary Kay really had someone there, or if perhaps someone who wasn't supposed to be there was hiding out waiting for the visitor to leave.

Not long after Audrey was born, Mary Kay called Amber and Angie Fish to see if they could watch her newborn. She was required by the court to participate in some evaluations and treatment—and she wasn't happy about it. The twins were elated about the prospect of seeing the baby, partly because they loved Mary Kay, but also because their mother was so convinced that Audrey wasn't Steve Letoumeau's.

Mary Kay was running late when she breezed into the condo. Her baby was in an infant carrier hidden by a blanket.

“Audrey's asleep,” she said, dropping the diaper bag. “Here's her formula. She should sleep for a while.”

Then she left, leaving the baby covered up.

Amber would never forget that visit and how she and her sister were dying to take a look under the blanket.” We were all peeking under the blanket, but no one wanted to touch it. The minute she walked out the door, 'Oh my God!' ”

There was Audrey, an adorable baby with a cap of black hair. Audrey didn't look anything like Steve, or even Mary Kay, for that matter. The girls wondered if the baby's father had been black.

With the coast clear and the moment too good to resist, Amber got out the video camera.

“To show my mom,” she said later.

The girls called a few friends to tell them about the baby's coloring.

“
Can I come over to see Mary Kay's baby?”

When Mary returned later, the girls hedged about what they really wanted to ask, and commented on Audrey's black hair.

“Doesn't she just have the greatest, darkest hair?” she said.

“Yes,” Amber said. “What is she?”

Mary didn't bat an eye. “Samoan,” she said. “Her middle name is Lokelani.”

The girls were still in shock, and later were unable to recall what Lokelani meant, though Mary explained the name's meaning and how it was perfect for her daughter.

Neither did Mary say who the father was. She said nothing about the boy, whom she still did not name for the girls.

For as long as the Fish twins had known Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau, they had been on a quest for the perfect couch. The one they had in Carriage Row was typical of many young couples—before a house full of children—it had once been white, but after time it turned an unseemly, dull gray. Of course at the Normandy Park address, such a battered sofa would never do. Mary Kay told the twins that she had finally found her dream piece of furniture and special-ordered a custom fabric. It was a floral tapestry with some pinks and blues and even some yellows. It wasn't cheap. Before it was shipped, Mary Kay said the furniture maker had told her that so many people commented on the unprecedented use of that fabric and how it came together with the style of the couch so magnificently. “They couldn't believe it,” she said.

“She was in love with the thing,” Angie Fish said later.

Good thing. For the summer of 1997, the sofa-sleeper was Mary Kay's home base. She arranged it at an angle in the den, a small carpeted room that had three exits and clear sight lines to outside of the house, the front door, and the hallway. The room was dominated by sliding glass doors to the patio. She never closed the sofa—the hide-abed was never hidden.

“Everything was around her bed,” Amber recalled. “Diapers, dirty diapers sitting there and she didn't get up to throw them away. She just kind of tossed them to the side.”

A constantly ringing phone in one hand, caller ID box at the ready, the remote control for the television in the other hand, Mary Kay sat at her command post. She was in a foxhole at the center of a storm of her own creation, and she seemingly loved every minute of it. She told the girls she used the caller ID to screen her calls, because a few “weirdos” were phoning and offering their support. They told her that they understood her because they had once loved what the law had forbidden, too.

“I'm not sick like that,” she said. “They think I'm on their level. I'm not one of them.”

Drifts of mail blanketed every surface of the room. A little hate mail, but mostly supportive missives. One time Mary Kay pulled out a letter she said had been written by the students of her sixth-grade class. She became teary-eyed as she read each loving word.

During each of her visits, Amber Fish couldn't help but notice notes and lists written by Mary Kay and scattered throughout the house. Most were directed toward David Gehrke and concerned areas that needed addressing for her defense. But she also posed questions better suited for a fortune-teller than a lawyer.

“
When will Vili and I be back together? What will happen to Vili? Why can't Vili and I be together?”

The little notes were familiar to the Fish sisters. When they baby-sat for Mary Kay at the condo, the girls frequently saw little lists and notes that Mary Kay had used to organize herself and her thoughts.

“She was always a list maker,” Angie said later.

Though she faced a more formidable adversary in the form of the King County prosecutor's office, Mary Kay focused much of her bitterness on her estranged husband. She was angered by the way friends and neighbors and then the public had taken his side by showing sympathy for the man now raising the kids on his own in Alaska. Mary Kay thought “the image” was a whole lot of baloney. At first, she refused to say much against him other than express her disdain for his smugness and holier-than-thou demeanor. Every once in a while, however, she would lift the curtain slightly to expose what had been a very unhappy marriage and a philandering husband.

“Well, there's a lot more here than you know,” she told Amber Fish one day at the house. “Steve isn't all perfect, you know.”

Amber knew that. No one was. But as far as she could tell from where she was standing without a father, Steve Letourneau was one terrific dad. He had worked hard to support his family, he played with his children, and he pretty much did whatever Mary Kay told him to do. She, not he, was always the force in charge of their household at Carriage Row. Amber assumed things were the same at Normandy Park.

But like a dripping faucet that no wrench could remedy, Mary Kay kept dropping hints until hints turned into shocking disclosure. She told the twins how he had beaten her when she was pregnant. Neither Angie nor Amber could really believe it.

“Steve was never violent,” Amber said sometime later. “We lived in that condo for years and you could hear the disposal running and we never could hear them fighting. You didn't even hear raised voices. Those walls were paper thin.”

Mary Kay told the Fish twins that Steve had cheated on her. In fact, she claimed he fathered a baby with a girlfriend “before Audrey was born.

“It's a boy,” she claimed. “The mother is telling her husband that the baby is his, but it's not. I guess they look enough alike.”

The teenagers couldn't believe their ears.

Not Steve. Not Steve of all people, they thought.

Though she talked mostly of Audrey, Mary Kay also spoke of her oldest children. It was Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie who were suffering the most, having been yanked like rag dolls from their mother. Mary Kay felt Steve was doing his best to make sure that her oldest children were excised from her life. Forever. She was convinced that he was tossing her letters into the trash. Screening her calls so the kids wouldn't have the opportunity to talk with their mom.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Mary Kay told Amber about a phone call she had managed to place to the children when Steve wasn't around to intercept it.

“The minute Jackie got on the phone she started screaming. It was like a scream that she was being murdered, like a scream I never heard… she wouldn't stop screaming because I wasn't there… ”

Amber started to cry, too.

No baby should be taken from her mother. It wasn't right
.

There were times when Mary would talk about her plans to regain visiting rights. She told the girls that her lawyers were going to fix it so that Steve couldn't live out of state. They'd have to live close enough to their mother so that she'd be able to take care of them.

If she thought that she could do all of that, she sometimes let doubt creep in. Mary Kay was smart enough to know a losing battle. And she knew she had caused it.

“I made a big mistake that hurt my family,” she often said, “but I never would change it. I ruined my family. I'm hurting those I love.”

Amber and Angie both knew that Mary Kay meant every word she uttered. There was no fix for the mess—not when she felt so strongly that her love with the boy was worth it all. The love with the boy was forever.

Audrey Lokelani was more than the daughter of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. The baby with the dark eyes and black hair was also a sibling to Mary's four children by Steve. The adults on both the Schmitz and Letourneau sides did whatever they could to ensure that whatever impact this new baby would have on its mother, it would not ruin the lives of the four already born.

All were in apparent agreement with the strategy, which included not talking about it and, heaven forbid, not promoting the fact that there was a new sibling back at their olive-green house in Normandy Park.

“Mary Kay's sister Liz was very upset when they found a picture of Audrey that Mary Kay had sent back East for Mary Claire's birthday. Her sister was very unhappy. 'I should have screened it. I should have made sure that something like that never got through.' ”

But Audrey
was
Mary Claire's sister and she knew it. True sisterhood would take time, and who knew what words were said to make the kids feel differently, but a closeness would happen. Yet on the day of her great-granddaughter's birthday even Nadine had to admit later: “Mary Claire was happy because she had a baby sister.”

And back in the house in Normandy Park, in the bathroom where the family of six all used to converge in morning and evening chaos, Mary Kay, Vili, and Audrey posed in front of the mirror and took a photograph. The flash burned a bright hole in the center of the image, leaving only the tops of their heads to their eyes.

“We didn't know it then,” Mary Kay later said, “but it was the only family portrait we'd ever take.”

Chapter 49

ONE DAY INTO the summer when Angie and Amber were over helping Mary Kay take care of Audrey at the Normandy Park house, she stopped referring to the baby's father as “the boy.”

“I guess I can tell you his name. Promise not to say anything to anyone?”

They agreed.

“Vili,” she said.

“Billy?” one of the girls asked.

“No. Vili with a V.”

She retrieved some pictures from another room and showed them to the sisters. They had done this with Mary Kay before; in fact, the girls considered it something that Mary Kay loved to do. She was forever looking at her children's pictures and remarking on their physical features and whose side of the family was represented in their noses, mouths, hands, eyes.

She pulled out a picture of Vili standing next to Steven and Mary Claire by the swing.

“This is really bad,” she said, as if apologizing. “He's a lot older-looking now.”

Angie studied the photo. The boy was taller than Steven was, but not by much. When she heard he was Samoan, both she and her sister thought he was going to be some monster of a guy—six-feet-four and 240 pounds. But he wasn't a linebacker type at all. At five feet two inches, he was lanky and gawky—and four inches shorter than Mary Kay.

He was just a boy. The way she had described him, he was really big for his age
.

Mary Kay went on to tell the sisters about how she had wanted to get him into Cornish, a Seattle school for the arts. He interviewed and showed his portfolio there the summer she became pregnant. He was so talented and mature for his age.

From the photograph, they couldn't see any of it.

It was also the first time Mary Kay came out and acknowledged the obvious. The baby was Vili's. Although from that first look Amber and Angie knew it wasn't Steve Letourneau's child, they never asked and she never said anything.

She also pulled out some pictures of Soona.

“I can't tell who Audrey looks more like. Do you think she looks like… ?” She studied the photograph and looked at her baby. “She could have gotten this dark hair from my mother,” she said.