Sex. Murder. Mystery(192)

The night before she was going to plead guilty and more than likely go to jail, Mary Letourneau walked over to the Bernsteins'. A certified letter for Tina had been put into the Letourneaus' mailbox and Mary brought it over. Tina could see how the events of the summer had been quite tough on Mary. She was tired and thin. Coming next door had been hard for her.

The meeting was awkward. There had been so much silence since it all started, Mary hadn't talked to Lee in months. Tina Bernstein had wanted to come over to tell Mary that she still cared about her and her children.

Tina's voice started to break. “I'm so sorry, but I didn't know what to say or do,” she said. “Every time something new comes out, I'm speechless.”

Mary started to cry, too.

“I know,” she said. “I've been putting a lot of people through some pain and confusion. I'm sorry.”

The women stood there as Mary apologized and tried to explain what had happened between her and Vili.

“She wanted me to know where she stopped seeing him as a boy and where she started seeing him as a man. She was very confused, too,” Tina Bernstein recalled later.

It was last-minute, as always, but Mary Kay called the Fish girls to see if their brother-in-law could do her hair on August 5. She had two big reasons: there was an interview the next day with Dateline NBC at the Gehrkes' house, and the day after that she was going to jail. The hairdresser called all over the Southcenter shopping area to find a salon that would stay open until he could get there to pick up the right supplies Mary Kay Letourneau needed to get her hair done—cut and foiled.

“It might be the last time I get my hair done for a while,” she said.

Late that night, Mary left Audrey with Soona and returned to Carriage Row, parking in front of her old condo, and went to the Fish home. She tried to appear upbeat, joking and telling Amber and Angie and their sister, Lisa, that everything was going to work out. One of the girls had the new issue of Cosmopolitan and read aloud a “love test.” From her makeshift hair salon chair in the kitchen, Mary Kay joined in.

“I haven't been able to goof around in a long time,” she said, thanking them for the diversion.

As they did the test, Mary Kay talked about Vili and how the two shared a special relationship that defied all reason. She said she was sorry for the pain their romance had caused so many people, and though she was going to plead guilty in court, it was a legal tactic, not real.

“The only crime I'm guilty of is betraying Steve,” she said.

When her hair was done, the girls walked her outside. There was an awkward moment of silence. No one knew what to say.

“I'll see you in seven,” she said and laughed before getting into her Fox.

Amber and Angie talked after their friend and former neighbor drove away. Neither one thought Mary Kay was going away to prison; it would be just a little jail time. But not seven years. There was no way.

Early in the morning of the day of her interview with Dateline, Mary Kay Letourneau had been on the phones trying to locate her children. She knew they were en route with their father on a Northwest Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Anchorage, where Steve had taken permanent residence after staying with the Gardners that spring. She worked the phone like a desperate mother or a telemarketer because Steve would not tell her the flight time or number and her sister Liz wasn't even answering her phone. She paged her son over airport P.A. systems across the country. Minneapolis. Detroit. Chicago.

Finally one airline employee (“An angel, one of my angels,” Mary Kay said later) broke the rules and gave her the flight number. Steve Letourneau and the four children were listed on a flight arriving in SeaTac at 11:02 that morning. With a Nordstom bag in one hand and a sack of presents in another, Mary Kay frantically found her way to the gate. For a moment, after she had gone to the wrong gate, she thought she had missed them and started to cry.

“Jacqueline saw me… ” Mary Kay said later, tears coming to her eyes. “She put her arms up and called for her mommy. She melted into my arms. They all did. Steve looked at me and said, 'She knew you'd be here. She was calling your name before we got off the plane.' My eyes said, F. U., but I said, 'And what if I wasn't? What if I hadn't been here?' “

Those two hours at the airport would be the last time Mary Kay would see her children.

The next day, August 7, 1997, a haltingly repentant Mary Kay Letourneau joined the inmate population of the King County Jail. Among the prisoners there, she was by far the most educated, best mannered, and most beautiful. Just as she appeared to Karen O'Leary and other news reporters back in March when she first walked into a courtroom with her hair held up in a barrette and wearing a gray maternity dress, she didn't look like she was the type of person who belonged in jail. But there she was. David Gehrke had told the court earlier in the day that she was sorry.