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.
“Those poor kids,” she added.
Sharon swore her mother to secrecy, as Steven had requested. He was going to handle it his own way. Sharon said that Steve didn't want to make it public until he had all of the evidence. And though Sharon had known about it for a while, she needed to talk to somebody about it. She could no longer hold it inside so she called her mother.
Whether they kept their mouths shut or not, there was going to be no hiding it. The boy was a Samoan and the baby would look like him, too.
“This will come out,” Nadine said.
“It will, Mother,” she said, adding that she wasn't going to the authorities, at least not without Steven saying so. They had to think about the four children and what was best for them.
Sharon had known since shortly after Mary Kay's visit with Vili that summer. Steven had told her. She also told her mother that Dick Letourneau and his wife, Phyllis, knew.
Nadine didn't breathe a word of it to anyone. She watched and waited. And she wondered. Why was Steven staying with his wife? Why didn't he take the kids from her and dump her?
Then the answer came to her. Despite it all, she knew that Steve still loved Mary Kay. Maybe the whole thing would blow over.
“I think Steven hoped she'd lose the baby,” Nadine said later.
The Letourneau clan didn't keep their vow of silence among themselves. Whenever Nadine and her daughters got together, the subject was the first order of business.
They felt so sorry for Steve. Outside of his four children, they saw Steve as the true victim in the whole thing. They felt he had been manipulated and brainwashed by his wife and the forces working with her. Nadine thought the priest was supporting Mary Kay.
“She went to the priest even and talked about it and took Steve. Tried to get the priest to talk Steve out of dissolving the marriage and just accepting the baby and going on.”
Nadine saw the meetings with the priest at St. Philomena as an attempt to buy time. She couldn't believe that Steve was so naive as to think that she'd really stay with him and raise the schoolboy's baby as their own.
Kind of hard to do if the baby has coal-black hair and dark skin! she thought.
She viewed it as more of Mary Kay's manipulation of Steve, whom she was sure was shell-shocked by the disclosure.
“She was trying to cover her own tracks, that's all she was doing,” she said. “He was still in denial, trying to make himself believe it [that he could raise the boy's baby]. How evil she was!”
Nadine never believed the pregnancy was anything but intentional and she told family members just what she thought.
“They planned it. She planned it. Same as she planned the pregnancy with Steve.”
Sometimes stories would filter from Steve to Sharon to Nadine, an information line that went from Washington to Alaska and back to Washington and pulsed with regularity.
Some stories brought outrage.
“She left Mary Claire one night all by herself—a nine-year-old girl—and took the rest of the children, probably Vili, too, to a movie because she was mad at Mary Claire. That was punishment! Steven came home at eleven at night, nobody around. Heard this little [girl] sobbing and went into the living room, curled up on the sofa, sobbing her little heart out. 'Mary Claire, where is Mom? Where is everybody?'
“You call that a loving mom?”
Chapter 29
IN THE FALL of 1996, Danelle Johnson sat at her kitchen table, sucked hard on a cigarette as she tried to figure out what was going on with her thirteen-year-old twins, Drew and Molly. The turn of events was almost beyond belief. The spring before, her youngest two couldn't wait to get out of Shorewood Elementary and into the halls of Cascade Middle School.