“She was in your class! And those guys have been helping you for three or four months. What do you mean you don't know her?”
Mary Letourneau sputtered to a finish.
“Well, I don't know her. We're not best friends. I'm kind of worried about her. She should have friends her own age.”
Danelle Johnson was furious. And she was hurt for her daughter, who had mixed up a relationship with an older woman. It was a friendship about which Molly spoke often. It was Ms. Letourneau this, Ms. Letourneau that. All day. Every day.
“All right,” she said softly. “I'll tell her to quit coming down there and bothering you or whatever she's doing to you. Seems to me like you've encouraged these kids to come around there and help you. I don't want to hurt her feelings.”
“I don't want to hurt her, either. I'm just worried about her. She shouldn't think she's my best friend.”
“She has a friend her own age,” Danelle said. “Her friend comes down there with her to help you. They think they're doing something great there.”
“I'm just real worried about her,” Mary repeated.
Danelle Johnson thanked the teacher for her concern and hung up. She was very troubled.
There's something wrong. Why would the kids think they should be going down there and helping her? And why would she call me to tell me she didn't even know Molly?
Later that day Danelle found a moment to talk to her daughter about the call.
“Ms. Letourneau doesn't want you to come around anymore,” she said.
The girl asked her mother for an explanation.
“She says you act like you're her best friend and she thinks you should have best friends your own age. She thinks you're getting way too involved. She asked you to stop—”
“Yeah, whatever, Mom.”
Danelle mulled it over that night and in the days and weeks after. She rationalized it. She worried about it. She figured the kids had become too rowdy and Mary Letourneau couldn't have them around as much. Maybe another teacher complained?
Teenyboppers aren't a lot of fun twenty-four hours a day. Maybe they got on her nerves.
Drew and Vili continued to go to Shorewood, while for the most part, Molly stayed away.
Not long after the phone call from the sixth-grade teacher, Danelle spoke to her new husband about it. It disturbed her that the kids were spending so much time with their former teacher.
“There's something weird going on,” she said. “Why is this woman hanging around with these kids from junior high school?”
Her husband didn't have an answer. No one did.
That Steve Letourneau had become violent and abusive toward Mary Kay to the point of hitting, kicking, and pushing her to the ground had been a shock to Michelle Jarvis. In all the years Michelle had known Mary Kay, she had never once heard of any abuse. Sure, Steve could be a jerk and punch some holes in the wall, but he didn't knock his wife around. But as Michelle learned, a few weeks after Steve found out that Mary Kay had become pregnant in the fall of 1996 things worsened in Normandy Park.
Mary Kay would reiterate some of the things that Steve had been saying and doing, and as the weeks went by, the information she shared with Michelle began to scare her. She not only worried for her friend, but she worried about the four Letourneau kids. In his embarrassment, hurt, rage, whatever, Steve never lost an opportunity to remind them what their mother had done.
“I know it for a fact, because I heard him when she was on the phone with me. She would write down all of the things he said to her. And he said things in front of the children. He would talk about where she had sexual relations with Vili. To little children!”
And always, Michelle Jarvis, more than anyone, would focus on the Letourneau children and how their parents had handled a terrible situation. It seemed that Mary Kay thought only of Vili and Steve was fixated on making Mary Kay pay for what she had done.
“The kids were an afterthought when she did what she did and they were an afterthought for him in that all he focused on was his own rage and his own need to get even or get back at her,” Michelle said later.
Michelle wrestled with the idea that maybe she could take in the children, and she discussed it with her husband. It was more thinking out loud than much else. How could it be otherwise? She had no claim to the kids. They were Mary Kay's and Steve's. She told Mary Kay that once the verbal and physical abuse started, she should take the children and leave. She should call the police and have Steve arrested. But Mary Kay kept insisting that Steve would come around and things would get better. They didn't. As the name-calling worsened, the children were left to absorb it all. Michelle worried that long-term damage had been done.
“The things Steve said about their mother… these kids are going to be in therapy forever. I doubt very much they are going to fully recover. They've been messed up for life. Damage control could have been had.”