If Loving You Is Wrong (44 page)

A referral to a constitutional law specialist reviewing the case brought the same results. Mary Kay Letourneau didn't call him back, either.

Though thousands of miles from Seattle, Tony Hollick continued to be a major player in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. He e-mailed the day and night away and spent countless hours on the telephone with the zeal of a true believer. He was so persuasive in his arguments, so damn charming and convincing, that whatever he said was rarely challenged by Mary Kay and her close friends. And because he was so staunch, the fact that he also was in love with Mary Kay was somehow overlooked. He held power. Even Tony's assertion of a far-reaching conspiracy rooted in hatred for sixty-seven-year-old John Schmitz and his political beliefs, which stripped Mary Kay of her constitutional rights, was accepted by the inner circle.

Only Michelle Jarvis began to have doubts.

“When I'd pin him to the wall—'Tony, send me an e-mail with the exact issues regarding the Constitution'—he never could do it. He kept pleading Constitution, conspiracy, and Constitution. 'Send me precise information that I can use with an attorney.' He never came up with it. And Mary Kay was hanging on that as a lifeline in her thread of hope that she'd be able to fight this thing and it never came true.”

Tony had convinced Michelle, Abby Campbell, and even Mary Kay that their phones were tapped, cars were bugged, or that people were following them.

“Be careful what you say on the phone,” he'd tell them.

Perhaps Tony's greatest influence was his suggestion that the antidepressant Depakote would min Mary Kay's creative vitality.
It would crush her like a cracker
. She should not take it. It was part of the conspiracy, part of why she was more a political prisoner for daring to love beyond the limits of society.

Free Mary Kay. Do not take the drugs. It is a conspiracy. Mary Kay, listen!

Outside of a paid appearance by Soona (“I'm a very private person”) Fualaau on
American Journal
in November, the gravy train the lawyers had sought hadn't come through. Even Mary Kay was disappointed; she wanted an A-list star to play her in a movie, but even a sitcom actress looking to stretch her acting abilities didn't seem as certain as it had. Bob Huff was having a hard time with his negotiations with publishers. According to David Gehrke, publishers said they liked the story of the teacher and the student, but the ending left them flat. There was also something else at work. Some publishers felt a little squeamish over the idea of a grown woman in a sexual relationship with a young boy. That fall a new version of
Lolita
was in the news, too. It was a critical success in Europe, but American distributors were reluctant to touch it because its content suggested to some a kind of acceptance of the sexual exploitation of a child.

Mary Kay and Vili had wanted the story sold as a love story, not a woman-in-jeopardy or a true-crime shocker. If it was a love story, how could it be written so that it would have a happy ending?

Chapter 66

IN THE FIRST week of January 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail. She moved into a spare room at the Seward Park home of former Shorewood Elementary colleague Beth Adair. She was angry that she couldn't see her children, still exiled in Alaska and out of her reach for at least another court-ordered six months. “I
don't care what anyone says, I will see my children.”
Jacqueline had turned five years old the week before her mother's release. The little blonde, like her three Letourneau siblings, had been without her mom since the spring. Mary Kay was also burdened and upset by a no-contact order with Vili and his mother; and visits with Audrey had to be supervised by a third party. To those who had not seen her for a while, the photograph taken for the registered sex offender's leaflet to hand out to neighbors would have been shocking. Mary Kay wore a teenager's zippered sweatshirt, baggy pants, and T-shirt two sizes too big. Her hair was pinned in back, but unkempt and disheveled. She looked lost and bewildered.

Later, Mary Kay would admit that she knew she blended in with teenagers. In fact, she and Beth Adair's daughter actually, hung out with the media while reporters kept a vigil near the house after her return to freedom.

“None of them knew it was me,” she said.

What little Michelle Jarvis was hearing from Seattle during the weeks after Mary Kay was released was extremely alarming. The impression she was getting was that Mary Kay wasn't focusing on treatment or repairing her shredded life. The court had ordered sexual deviancy treatment and her acceptance of that as a condition for a suspended sentence was incontrovertible. Michelle didn't like it any more than Mary Kay did, but a flagrant violation of the court's order would send her back to prison and keep her from her children. If she wanted Audrey back, she'd have to do what was required. But she didn't. She wasn't taking her medication; she was using a vitamin regimen instead. She refused to participate with her deviancy counselor.

She was in love and why couldn't anyone see that?

Instead of doing what the law required, Mary Kay was prowling around, up all night, sleeping all day, and spending money she didn't really have.

“She's not dealing in reality at all,” Michelle told her husband. “If it was me, I'd be looking at rebuilding my life. I've a second chance here. I don't want to screw this up.”

Every time she called Beth Adair's house, she was left with either no answer or word that Mary Kay was out. Messages were left, but she never returned a phone call. Not once. The change startled Michelle. When she was in jail she had called regularly.

What's going on up there? she wondered
.

For Linda and Kyle Gardner, the repercussions of turning Mary Kay in to the police were lasting and excruciating. While they had been invited to the cousin's engagement party back in January 1997—when Steve and Mary Kay's absence got Secret Squirrel to thinking—they were not asked to attend the wedding that spring. Some family members didn't call anymore. Some ignored them at family gatherings. Being ostracized for doing what she thought was the right thing hurt Linda deeply. When he thought she was wallowing in something over which she had no control, her husband told her to knock it off.

“Don't let it consume you,” he told her. “You need to go on.”

But she couldn't. Not completely. Because even though Mary Kay had done something so reprehensible, the Letoumeau side of the family could not find it within their hearts to support Linda.

“I'm the villain,” she said later. “I'm the bad person. I shouldn't have turned her in.
You shouldn't have. You shouldn 't have.”

At one family event one of the relatives made it a point to remind Linda that “ignorance is bliss.”

But she knew
.

“Because they didn't do something right away, I've paid a price,” she told a friend.

What stunned Linda even more was that so many knew for so long. Mothers knew. Fathers knew.

“Mary Kay was the golden girl, all right,” she said later.

One evening in mid-January Linda Gardner got a call from a girlfriend.

“Linda, you'll never guess who I saw at the Super Mall. Mary Kay Letourneau.”

The woman who had started the ball rolling with her call to Child Protective Services and the school district was all ears when the caller said she actually tailed Mary Kay for a while just to see what she was doing at the mammoth discount mall on the outskirts of Auburn. She was with another woman, whom Linda deduced must have been her good friend Abby, the wife of the lawyer.

According to what the friend said, Mary Kay had been walking around in a cloud “
la la la la
, wanting people to notice her. In fact, she was in one of the designer stores, you know, saying 'I've been out of fashion for about six months, what's in now?' “

For Mary Kay's old Normandy Park neighbors, there had been little contact with the Letourneau children once Steve took them to Alaska for a fresh start, out of the fray. Ellen Douglas and her son, Scott, were among the only neighbors to see the kids in their new household up north. A Boy Scout event brought mother and son to Anchorage, and a visit to the townhouse Steve now shared with flight attendant Kelly Whalen was wanted very much by all sides. It was January 1997, and the television played scenes from the Winter Olympics. The townhouse was immaculate, not a speck of dust anywhere.

“
Sunset
magazine could do a spread,” Ellen said later.

She watched Jacqueline run around the off-white carpet carrying an open box of grape Jell-0 without a reprimand from anyone.

Don't fall with that mix, Jackie, Ellen thought
.

But the place was calm. The kids seemed happy and relaxed. No one talked about Mary Kay and what might happen now that she was free to start her life over. Ellen liked Kelly, she seemed caring and involved and she provided the kind of order that their mother never possessed.

“They seemed okay,” she said later. “Maybe they were wrecks, but I don't know. I know it is going to be tough.”

She and her son left Alaska feeling hopeful that things would turn out all right after all.

* * *

The Mecca Cafe was one of those authentic restaurants where meat loaf was still served, and waitresses worked there long enough to know almost every customer by name. The cafe at the base of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill was a favorite hangout for one of Mary Kay's chief groupies, and had been so for a decade and a half. The friend thought it would be a wonderful out-of-the-spotlight place for Mary's thirty-fifth birthday. She agreed. The guest list was small, a few regulars from the Mecca, Mary, the friend, and Abby Campbell. By one P.M. on January 30, 1998, everyone was there.

Mary arrived in what had become her signature outfit since her release: full-blown teenage regalia that consisted of pedal pushers and a baggy T-shirt. She was upbeat, happy. Conversation was breezy that afternoon and spirits were high. Abby Campbell pulled a batch of photos from her purse and presented them to Mary. Images of Vili and baby Audrey were fanned over the back booth's surface. Abby invited Mary to keep a sampling—but not all of them. The friend who arranged the birthday lunch thought it was peculiar. Mary didn't ask for the whole lot of them. It was as if she didn't mind being told what to take, what to do.

She's a teenager, he thought
.

A little while later, after Abby left, the friend leaned over and pounced. He had one question he'd been dying to ask.

“How the hell do you stay in touch with Vili?” he asked Mary.

Mary looked over her shoulder; her eyes darted over the restaurant, up past the row of stools fronting the counter to the front door.

“Abby Campbell and Bob Huff help me,” she said.

The friend had suspected as much, but the answer ate at him. If true, not only were the pair helping Mary to violate a court order prohibiting contact between Mary and Vili, they were putting a fragile woman in a precarious situation. They were adding fuel to a bonfire. Mary Letourneau didn't see it that way. She saw their help as a way to stay close to the man/boy of her dreams.

“I had a bad feeling about it,” he said later. “And, of course, I was right.”

Later, when he confronted the others about what Mary had told him, they denied it. If Mary had been in contact with Vili, then it hadn't been through gofer Abby or lawyer Bob Huff.

“Believe what you want,” the friend said later, “I know what I heard.”

Bob Huff stood firm on the subject many months later. He did not,
would not,
facilitate communication between Mary Kay and Vili.

“[Neither] Mary nor Vili ever put me in that position,” he said. “They knew I wouldn't do it and they knew it would get me in hot water with the judge and the prosecution. Besides, why would I encourage the relationship between Mary and Vili? I didn't think the relationship was particularly healthy. Let's say that there wasn't equal bargaining power between Mary and Vili. I thought it would be better for him to be without her for a while, anyway. Let him be for a few years... so he can move in another direction if he wants to.”

On the other hand, Bob Huff couldn't absolve Abby Campbell of possibly keeping what she apparently considered star-crossed lovers in touch.

“Abby did a lot of stuff I wouldn't do,” the lawyer said finally.

Chapter 67

IT WAS A typical winter's night. The low temperatures were in the forties and the high the next day would only be ten degrees warmer. Dogs barked intermittently down by Lake Washington and porch lights glowed like fireflies in the 4800 block of Forty-ninth Avenue South, the Seward Park neighborhood where Beth Adair lived. One family even had Christmas lights still on, though it was February 3, 1998.

At 2:24 A.M. Seattle Police Officer Todd Harris was pulling routine neighborhood patrol when he happened across a VW Fox parked in front of the Shorewood Elementary music teacher's home. He could see a woman sitting in the driver's seat, her head turned toward the passenger side. Her blond hair was matted against the glass of the windows painted with condensation. The parking lights of the Fox were on.