Sex. Murder. Mystery(122)

“If you ask any of my relatives which was the most beautiful wedding, they would say mine,” Mary Kay later told a friend.

Steve's maternal relatives didn't have the funds or couldn't take time off from work to attend the ceremony. Dick Letourneau and his second wife made it, though. It was just as well. It wasn't the wedding of anyone's dreams, anyway. For Mary Kay, everything was perfect with the exception of a groom that she didn't love.

Back in Puyallup, Washington, Grandma Nadine had worked her fingers to the bone at a local drugstore chain; she had raised her children with love and a firm hand. She was the kind of woman who refused to take any guff from anyone. She didn't like the phoniness that came with money and social standing. Steve was her grandson and when he and his new bride returned from the wedding in Washington, D.C., after dropping out of college, she insisted on holding a reception for her side of the family, since only the money side—the Letourneaus—had been able to travel back East for the wedding. Steve's mother, Sharon, had yet to meet her son's bride. Nadine cooked day and night, spruced up her mobile home, and set a pretty table.

Mary Kay was polite and demure and very beautiful and Nadine took an instant dislike to her. A few minutes after they met, the sixty-something woman with glasses that pinched her nose excused herself and went to the kitchen where her daughters were working.

“Well, wonder when she's due?” Nadine asked.

“Mother!” one of the daughters said.

“Okay, bet me. I didn't have six kids for nothing.”

The younger women laughed it off.

But, of course, their mother was right.

A few weeks later, Steve confirmed that his new wife was pregnant. His grandmother was satisfied that she had been correct.

“It takes two to tango,” she said. “If a girl's gonna lay down with a guy, a guy's gonna take it. I don't care who it is—could be the Pope.”

“She trapped him,” Nadine said several years later, still furious over the situation. “She thought she was getting into a wanna-be Kennedy-type situation because he was the preppy-type kid that was going to Arizona State.”

Her perspective possibly skewed by bitterness, Grandma Nadine would later shake her head at the memory of her first impression of Mary Kay Letourneau. She was uneasy about Steve's girlish and wide-eyed bride with the upper-crust pedigree, and wasn't afraid to say so. Nadine was the type of woman who arrived at instant and ironclad conclusions when it came to sizing up a person's character.

“I knew there was going to be trouble,” she said later.

A few months after Nadine's reception in Puyallup, Steven, Jr., was born at a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. When Mary Kay and Steve brought their first baby home from the hospital the new mother put him in a family-heirloom bassinet that she had lined with fabric she had ordered from the Paris specialty retailer, Descamps.

“It was just perfect,” she said later of the fabric. “It was a pattern of soft delicate hearts, classic, not the Valentine's hearts, but a more classic look.”





Chapter 13

SOUTH OF SEATTLE and not far from the airport, Kent, Washington, had been in a growth spurt for much of the 1980s. The suburban city was a bland mix of old and new. Ticky-tacky apartments along I-5 and view homes overlooking the Kent Valley and Mount Rainier were at the extremes. It was by far middle and working class.

Traffic had been increasing steadily. Making a left turn down into the valley was becoming more difficult for the folks who lived in the condominium complex called Carriage Row and worked in the basin that had become a sprawl of nondescript aerospace offices where truck farms once flourished. In 1985 Steve, Mary Kay, and their toddler son, Steven, moved into unit 109 of the town-house-style complex done up in theme more akin to Boston than Seattle. The family moved down from Anchorage; Steve had been transferred to the SeaTac hub of Alaska Airlines where he worked handling baggage. Mary Kay was gearing up for classes at Seattle University where she would complete what she had started at Arizona State. She was going to be a teacher.

One sunny afternoon when Joe Bendix was pruning some shrubbery in front of his condominium, he was interrupted by Mary Letourneau. A very casual Mary.

“Have you seen my son, Steven?” she asked.

Joe said he hadn't. He put down his tools.

“I haven't seen him in a while,” she said. “Wonder where he is… ”

Her tone was flat. She was so casual about it.

Hadn't seen him in a while.

Joe Bendix knew the drill. There were plenty of times when Mary would get busy doing something, lose track of the time and her barely-out-of-diapers son. More than once Joe would call over to another neighbor and the pair would canvas the parking lot, the greenbelt, and the edge of the property abutting the apartment construction site in search of little Steven.