Reporting Mary in the past for anything seldom brought results, not even a reprimand that the teacher could remember. For whatever reason, the principal did not act. So why should she bother?
One night around seven P.M. when the linoleum hallway of the Shorewood annex was quiet, the Shorewood custodian came across Mary Letourneau coming out of the girls' bathroom just to the west of her classroom. The man was on his way in to clean the toilets. The lights were off. Mary Kay seemed a little nervous, and quickly indicated that her former student Vili Fualaau was upset about something and had sequestered himself in a stall. Mary said she tried to calm him down.
“He's having one of his attitudes. You know teenagers,” she said, offering a smile and shrug.
The janitor had teenagers of his own and said he understood. He liked Mary Letourneau and knew that the boy in the bathroom was a regular visitor to room 39. He was a good kid.
He didn't think much of the encounter and didn't report it. Neither did he report the time he saw Vili driving his teacher's van in the school parking lot.
Chapter 33
IT WAS NO surprise that Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau were late. They had never made it on time for anything. Steve's cousin Kyle Gardner and his wife, Linda, not only expected perpetual tardiness, but often placed a bet with each other about how late they'd show up. An hour? Two? The smart money was always a little later than that. Linda bet for money; her husband bet for sexual favors. Linda usually won.
But in January 1997, Steve and Mary Kay didn't show up at all to an engagement party at the Tacoma Country Club for one of Steve's cousins. Chronically late was one thing, not appearing at a family function was very peculiar.
Kyle Gardner's mother and Steve's father, Dick Letourneau, were siblings and their respective sons were practically raised together, until Dick and Sharon moved to Anchorage.
Standing in the buffet line, Linda asked another Letourneau cousin where Steve and Mary Kay were.
The young woman looked at her with a serious, but puzzled look.
“Don't you know?” the cousin asked.
As Linda indicated she didn't know anything, an aunt nudged the cousin, her daughter, out of the way and abruptly ended the conversation.
Linda stood there with her plate wondering what was going on.
Something's funny here for her to be whisked away like that.
Linda Gardner was a fireplug of a woman. She was outspoken in a family where it seemed they preferred agreement or compliance. Linda was not a troublemaker, but a woman who knew that by age thirty-two, she was old enough to speak her mind. She and her husband, Kyle, were raising a son and a daughter and they were doing it on their own—without family handouts. Linda was planning a dream house that she was going to build herself. If she broke a nail, who in the hell cared?
She was also a lover of information-gathering and digging deep into a subject to bring out what no one had known before. This was not to say she was nosy or pushy, though some family members might have thought so. When Linda ferreted out the truth behind a family relationship, Kyle nicknamed his wife Secret Squirrel, after the crime-fighting rodent cartoon show of their childhood.
It was the encounter at the buffet line at the engagement party that put her into Secret Squirrel overdrive. Everyone had been so quiet about Steve and Mary Kay. No one would say a word, though one did let slip that the two were having marital problems. That was news to Linda.
“I thought they were the perfect little Catholic family,” she said later.
Of course, Linda had no idea what was really going on. She had no idea what was going on with Mary Kay and she never would have guessed it in a million years. And she certainly didn't know that Steve was already involved with another woman, a beautiful Alaska Airlines flight attendant from Newport Beach named Kelly Whalen. The two had purportedly met in Mexico when Steve took a little holiday to get away from his troubles.
Chapter 34
IT ATE AT Secret Squirrel like splashed acid. Linda Gardner couldn't stand the secrecy and the silence surrounding Steve and Mary Kay's faltering marriage. What was the frickin' deal? No one even mentioned them anymore. It was like they had taken a swan dive off the face of the earth. The Gardners had sent their daughter on a trip to visit grandparents in Arizona for midwinter break. The couple decided to stop by the new house of another of Kyle's cousins near SeaTac Airport before the plane bringing their daughter rolled down the tarmac.
By then Kyle seemed just as interested in the silence as his wife had been. When the new homeowners were showing them around their yard, Kyle asked about it.
“What's going on with Steve and Mary Kay? Everyone is so quiet.”
Before the cousin or his wife could answer, Linda spoke up.