Sex. Murder. Mystery(153)

“Well, I know something's wrong. I know it's Mary Kay. I think she's having an affair and it's not with a man. Either she's a lesbian or something worse.”

The cousin's wife's mouth went agape.

“You guys really don't know, do you?” she said.

“No,” Linda said, “we don't know. What?”

The cousin answered for his wife, saying that they couldn't tell.

“I have sworn that I won't tell anybody what I know,” he said.

Secret Squirrel's mind raced as it went into high gear.

Oh, my God. She's a lesbian, she thought.

On their way home, they drove past the house in Normandy Park, just to see. Linda slumped in the passenger seat, as if being detected would matter or as if she were on some kind of a spy mission. She had never been to the house before, and after what she had heard, she thought the place looked like a dump—not the showplace Mary Kay had let others believe. She saw Steven walking down the street, but no other sign of the distraught family with the lesbian mother.

When they arrived at their home in Bonney Lake, Linda urged Kyle to phone his mother in Kentucky to find out what was going on. He called from the kitchen and Linda got on a bedroom extension. Kyle told his mother that they didn't like being in the dark. Everyone in the family knew something was up. Everyone but them.

“You two have to swear that you will not tell anybody or do anything,” she said. “You have to swear to me.”

Linda crossed her fingers. “I swear,” she said, echoing Kyle's promise.

“Mary Kay was having an affair,” Kyle's mother said.

“Yeah.”

“She's pregnant.”

“Oh, really?” That was news to Linda. She hadn't heard a word of any pregnancy. Then Kyle's mother dropped the bomb of all bombs.

“It's with a twelve-year-old,” she said.

Linda didn't say a word, but a phrase bounced through her head as though she had been screaming from a mountaintop.

Oh, my God!

It shocked Linda that no one had turned Mary Kay in to the police.

The mother said the Letourneaus were hoping that the boy, who had been one of Mary Kay's students, would come forward and break the story. Steve's family had kept silent because of the children involved. Once more, Kyle's mother made them promise not to breathe a word.

“Her attitude was very firm. 'Do not tell anybody. Do not do anything about it.' She didn't say it was right,” Linda said later. “She didn't say it was wrong. 'Do keep your mouths shut.' “

Putting together the pieces wasn't easy, not even for Secret Squirrel. Linda Gardner had always considered Mary Kay Letourneau a bit of a phony—at least she was so overly nice it seemed that no person could be genuinely that sweet. Linda remembered the last time she saw Mary was at the Western Washington State Fair in Puyallup, south of Seattle. She and her two children bumped into Mary and her four kids quite by accident. It was mid-September 1996.

Since the children were shirttail cousins, Linda thought it was nice that all could be together at the same time, even though the meeting was merely accidental. But Mary was in a hurry; she was preoccupied. She didn't seem to want to pal around like she might have done in the past.

“She was real fast. At that time she wasn't her bubbly self. She wanted to get away from me pretty fast,” Linda said later.

Of course, at that time, the Letourneaus' world was beginning to unravel. Mary Kay was pregnant and no one knew it.

That night, Linda Gardner poured herself a big glass of wine and told her husband that they had to confirm his mother's story. What she had said was so unbelievable, so off-the-wall, and so ugly, that Linda didn't think it could really be true.

“Are we imagining this?” she asked.

It was so disturbing.

A thirty-five-year-old teacher having sex with a sixth-grader! How dare a teacher we put in the classroom with our children do this?

She was also bitter at her husband's family for their conspiracy of deceit. They knew that fall. They knew at Thanksgiving. They knew at Christmas. At the engagement party in January.

“Kyle's mother came out for the holidays and she knew and she didn't tell us a thing. When I look back at this it angers me. From a parent's point of view, here she was still teaching. She was still in the classroom,” she said later.

Linda was consumed with worry. She wondered if this boy wasn't the only one. She feared for Mary Kay's two sons or others in the classroom.

“You don't all of a sudden go from being an outstanding teacher and having sex with a twelve-year-old boy. You just don't,” she told her husband.

At his wife's urging, Kyle phoned Steve's younger sister, Stacey, in Alaska to discern what she knew. Stacey recounted the same story, adding that everyone in the family had known about it for months. It started in September when Steve discovered love letters and journal entries written by Mary Kay. He confronted the boy at his house and told him to back off his wife. Dick Letourneau had wanted to turn Mary Kay in to the police, but decided not to because of the impact it would have on his four grandchildren.