A constantly ringing phone in one hand, caller ID box at the ready, the remote control for the television in the other hand, Mary Kay sat at her command post. She was in a foxhole at the center of a storm of her own creation, and she seemingly loved every minute of it. She told the girls she used the caller ID to screen her calls, because a few “weirdos” were phoning and offering their support. They told her that they understood her because they had once loved what the law had forbidden, too.
“I'm not sick like that,” she said. “They think I'm on their level. I'm not one of them.”
Drifts of mail blanketed every surface of the room. A little hate mail, but mostly supportive missives. One time Mary Kay pulled out a letter she said had been written by the students of her sixth-grade class. She became teary-eyed as she read each loving word.
During each of her visits, Amber Fish couldn't help but notice notes and lists written by Mary Kay and scattered throughout the house. Most were directed toward David Gehrke and concerned areas that needed addressing for her defense. But she also posed questions better suited for a fortune-teller than a lawyer.
“When will Vili and I be back together? What will happen to Vili? Why can't Vili and I be together?”
The little notes were familiar to the Fish sisters. When they baby-sat for Mary Kay at the condo, the girls frequently saw little lists and notes that Mary Kay had used to organize herself and her thoughts.
“She was always a list maker,” Angie said later.
Though she faced a more formidable adversary in the form of the King County prosecutor's office, Mary Kay focused much of her bitterness on her estranged husband. She was angered by the way friends and neighbors and then the public had taken his side by showing sympathy for the man now raising the kids on his own in Alaska. Mary Kay thought “the image” was a whole lot of baloney. At first, she refused to say much against him other than express her disdain for his smugness and holier-than-thou demeanor. Every once in a while, however, she would lift the curtain slightly to expose what had been a very unhappy marriage and a philandering husband.
“Well, there's a lot more here than you know,” she told Amber Fish one day at the house. “Steve isn't all perfect, you know.”
Amber knew that. No one was. But as far as she could tell from where she was standing without a father, Steve Letourneau was one terrific dad. He had worked hard to support his family, he played with his children, and he pretty much did whatever Mary Kay told him to do. She, not he, was always the force in charge of their household at Carriage Row. Amber assumed things were the same at Normandy Park.
But like a dripping faucet that no wrench could remedy, Mary Kay kept dropping hints until hints turned into shocking disclosure. She told the twins how he had beaten her when she was pregnant. Neither Angie nor Amber could really believe it.
“Steve was never violent,” Amber said sometime later. “We lived in that condo for years and you could hear the disposal running and we never could hear them fighting. You didn't even hear raised voices. Those walls were paper thin.”
Mary Kay told the Fish twins that Steve had cheated on her. In fact, she claimed he fathered a baby with a girlfriend “before Audrey was born.
“It's a boy,” she claimed. “The mother is telling her husband that the baby is his, but it's not. I guess they look enough alike.”
The teenagers couldn't believe their ears.
Not Steve. Not Steve of all people, they thought.
Though she talked mostly of Audrey, Mary Kay also spoke of her oldest children. It was Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie who were suffering the most, having been yanked like rag dolls from their mother. Mary Kay felt Steve was doing his best to make sure that her oldest children were excised from her life. Forever. She was convinced that he was tossing her letters into the trash. Screening her calls so the kids wouldn't have the opportunity to talk with their mom.
Sobbing uncontrollably, Mary Kay told Amber about a phone call she had managed to place to the children when Steve wasn't around to intercept it.
“The minute Jackie got on the phone she started screaming. It was like a scream that she was being murdered, like a scream I never heard… she wouldn't stop screaming because I wasn't there… ”
Amber started to cry, too.
No baby should be taken from her mother. It wasn't right.
There were times when Mary would talk about her plans to regain visiting rights. She told the girls that her lawyers were going to fix it so that Steve couldn't live out of state. They'd have to live close enough to their mother so that she'd be able to take care of them.
If she thought that she could do all of that, she sometimes let doubt creep in. Mary Kay was smart enough to know a losing battle. And she knew she had caused it.