But as time went on, the danger grew. The groupies supported Mary Kay Letourneau. She was in love and it was nobody's business but hers and Vili's.
“Why are you rolling over?” they'd ask over and over. “Why are you letting your attorney do this? Why aren't you fighting this ?”
The Fish twins were mystified by all the people who were hanging around the jail. As far as they could tell, none of the hangers-on who had crawled out of the woodwork knew their friend before she was arrested. Before going in to see Mary Kay one time that fall, Amber and Angie noticed a woman with a stack of notebooks and an attitude.
Who in the hell is she? both wondered.
As the visiting time ended and the phone service between the glass partition of the Visitors alcove was shut off, there was a raucous pounding on the door. Amber and Angie looked over and saw it was the same woman with the notebooks and clipboard hammering away with her fists to get their attention.
As they swung the door open Mary Kay was being led back to her cell, and the woman scolded them sternly for taking up all of her time, as if she were their mother.
“Usually if I get here people will let me in to talk to her,” she said, pushing past and yelling for Mary through the glass. Mary called over her shoulder that she would phone her later. The woman fumed.
“Like she was so important. But I'd never seen her before,” Angie said later, “so I didn't care.”
The three exited the building for the parking lot. The woman with the notebooks hurried ahead.
“Well, who are you?” Amber asked when they caught up with her.
“Abby. I'm a friend,” she said, turning around.
“I've never seen you before,” Angie retorted.
Abby Campbell explained that she was helping with Mary Kay's case. When Angie asked if she knew how they could reach Steve to send a card to the kids, Abby became noticeably bitter.
“We're going to get those kids back,” she said. “You can help us campaign.”
Campaign? What did she think this was, some election or something? She doesn't even know the Letourneau children.
The girls thought she was odd, a middle-aged woman, caught up in something that made her feel important.
Amber figured Mary Kay had found someone to do her bidding.
“Mary Kay knows how to use people. She knows exactly what to say and do,” she said later.
* * *
More so than some of the others, Kate Stewart could see the true basis of the bond between Abby Campbell and Mary Kay Letourneau. She could readily dismiss what some had said—that Abby was a groupie living through the stranger in jail, enraptured by a tale of forbidden love. As Kate rationalized it, Abby was a woman in need of a mission in life; a person in search of a purpose. It evidently wasn't enough that she had a lawyer husband and a house full of children to raise.
“Abby was there for whatever Mary Kay needed to do. It's a two-way street, but Mary Kay is the needy one now, so Abby comes,” Kate said later.
Errands? Abby could do them. Calls to David Gehrke? Abby could make them—sometimes every day. Running down psychologists for Mary Kay's defense? Abby could do it. Kate and Michelle were glad that someone was in place to do what they couldn't do from a thousand miles away. At times, Kate thought her college friend's troubles had “consumed Abby's life way too much.” Abby lived and breathed Mary Kay Letourneau and relentlessly worked the phones and sent e-mails to keep the process moving—even when there was nowhere for it to go. It was almost obsessive and certainly annoying to some.
One time she called Kate when she was hosting a party at her suburban Chicago home. Kate's physician husband picked up the phone and let Abby have it. “What's your problem?” he barked into the receiver. “You've got five kids! Get a life! You're following this Mary Kay thing too much. Let it go,” he said.
Appearances were crucial. Anyone who knew Mary Kay Letourneau knew that. Shopping, grooming, saying the right thing at the right time, all were of the utmost importance. During visiting hours at the jail one time, Amber and Angie Fish made the mistake of mentioning to Mary that she was looking thin. They should have known better. Mary Kay was always worried about her weight. After giving birth to her children she went on a protein drink to put weight back on.
“Do I really look bad?” she said from behind the glass partition.
The twins tried to reassure her, but it was too late.
“Do I look sick? You should see the food they give us. I'll start ordering cookies at dinner. I swear.”
Mary also obsessed about her hair, which was flyaway and out of control.
“It's the shampoo,” she said. “I can only order baby shampoo and no conditioner—that's why my hair looks like this.”