Sex. Murder. Mystery(172)

Judy felt sorry for Mary, but Katie would not be her little dove sending messages from her to Vili.

“I can't allow it,” she said.

Katie phoned Vili after her mother got off the phone. She didn't know what the three words were but if she did she would have told him. Why hadn't she asked?

“Is she okay?” Vili asked.

“Yeah,” she answered.

“Is she crying?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Did you calm her down? Did you tell her everything was going to be okay?”

Alone in her upstairs room, thinking it over for the gazillionth time, Katie Hogden held on to one great hope that Mary Letourneau was in love with the right guy.

“He was just as concerned for her as she was for him,” she said later.

She wondered what the three words were. Was it so basic as “I love you”? Or was it more creative? Deeper? More personal? She also wondered why she hadn't asked what the words were. Just in case.

When Mary knew that she was not going to be with Vili for a long time because the courts had restricted their contact and some jail time was all but a certainty, she timidly asked Katie Hogden the same question she had posed to so many others. It was a question that none of her friends liked to answer.

“Do you think Vili will wait for me?”

This was difficult. Katie knew that Vili loved Mary at some level, but if it was a lasting love she couldn't be certain. Wise as she was, Katie was only thirteen years old.

She tried to be kind, to keep Mary's sagging spirits lifted. But she wasn't a liar.

“He may not be there when you get back,” she said. “But he'll remember and he'll probably want to come back.”

Mary understood.

“I'm sure you'll always be friends,” Katie said.

It broke their hearts to see the Letourneau family crash and burn. The four kids were about to be scattered to the winds and the parents were living in the same house, but not speaking to each other. Steve slept in the bedroom and Mary Kay stayed camped out on the hide-a-bed. Amber and Angie Fish saw it as the end of the perfect family. They never, ever could have imagined that anything could break up Mary Kay and Steve.

They could never have conceived of Mary Kay falling in love with a student, either.

Almost as much as they wanted to support Mary Kay, they wanted to let Steve know how they felt about him. How worried they were and how much they loved him, too. But he would never look into their eyes.

Only one time did he even make a halfhearted attempt to speak to them.

“He was very short, abrupt,” Amber recalled later. “I kept trying to make eye contact with Steve. I just wanted to talk to him. I never got the chance… ”

Steve didn't appear to want anyone's help.

When people called, he hung up. When a neighbor knocked on the door to let Steve know that he was supported by lots of people, he barely listened.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said before shutting the door.

The twins talked about Steve's behavior with their mother.

“Steve's hardly around,” Angie said, “and he's got a baby coming.”

“He's not around because it's not his baby,” their mother said.

The girls thought their mother was way off base.

“There's no way,” Amber said. “Of course it is.”

Joy Fish didn't think so.

“It probably isn't,” she said.

It was too much. The fact that the teacher had been having a sexual relationship with a student was bad enough. Shorewood parent Danelle Johnson thought it couldn't get any worse, but of course it did. Danelle had a better pipeline for information than the Fish girls or their mother. She learned from her children that Mary Letourneau was carrying Vili's baby.

“The kids thought it was just another awesome sign that it was a meant-to-be romance. I thought it was godawful,” she said later.

Parents, for the most part, didn't see it the same way. In fact, few thought the pregnancy was positive proof about anything, other than it proved the woman hadn't been teaching birth control. Some fathers joked about wishing they could have had a tutor like Mary Kay Letourneau.

Many played the gender-reversal “what if” game. Danelle had a unique take on that kind of supposition. As mother of boy/girl twins it was easy for her to flip the roles.

“Molly tells me she's in love with a thirty-five-year-old man and they got pregnant to prove their love, and I'm gonna kill the motherfucker. End of story. Same with my son. I'm gonna kill her. Mary can be as sick as she wants to be, as demented as she wants, and I would,” she said later.

With her honeydew-round belly, Mary Kay Letourneau thumbed her nose at the court order prohibiting unsupervised contact with her children, and the five of them boarded an Alaska Airlines flight to Southern California. They stayed with Michelle and Michael Jarvis and their three children in their home in Costa Mesa. Mary Kay knew her time with her children would be limited for a while and she wanted to spend every minute with Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie. Disneyland was their prime destination, and was wonderful as always. Mary Kay reminded her brood that their grandfather had once worked at the theme park as a Cobblestone Cop. Later, they played in the surf at Newport Beach. Mary Kay even took her kids up to Spyglass Hill to drive by the old house and to remember what once had been and imagine the future.