Later, Mary Kay would admit that she knew she blended in with teenagers. In fact, she and Beth Adair's daughter actually, hung out with the media while reporters kept a vigil near the house after her return to freedom.
“None of them knew it was me,” she said.
What little Michelle Jarvis was hearing from Seattle during the weeks after Mary Kay was released was extremely alarming. The impression she was getting was that Mary Kay wasn't focusing on treatment or repairing her shredded life. The court had ordered sexual deviancy treatment and her acceptance of that as a condition for a suspended sentence was incontrovertible. Michelle didn't like it any more than Mary Kay did, but a flagrant violation of the court's order would send her back to prison and keep her from her children. If she wanted Audrey back, she'd have to do what was required. But she didn't. She wasn't taking her medication; she was using a vitamin regimen instead. She refused to participate with her deviancy counselor.
She was in love and why couldn't anyone see that?
Instead of doing what the law required, Mary Kay was prowling around, up all night, sleeping all day, and spending money she didn't really have.
“She's not dealing in reality at all,” Michelle told her husband. “If it was me, I'd be looking at rebuilding my life. I've a second chance here. I don't want to screw this up.”
Every time she called Beth Adair's house, she was left with either no answer or word that Mary Kay was out. Messages were left, but she never returned a phone call. Not once. The change startled Michelle. When she was in jail she had called regularly.
What's going on up there? she wondered.
For Linda and Kyle Gardner, the repercussions of turning Mary Kay in to the police were lasting and excruciating. While they had been invited to the cousin's engagement party back in January 1997—when Steve and Mary Kay's absence got Secret Squirrel to thinking—they were not asked to attend the wedding that spring. Some family members didn't call anymore. Some ignored them at family gatherings. Being ostracized for doing what she thought was the right thing hurt Linda deeply. When he thought she was wallowing in something over which she had no control, her husband told her to knock it off.
“Don't let it consume you,” he told her. “You need to go on.”
But she couldn't. Not completely. Because even though Mary Kay had done something so reprehensible, the Letoumeau side of the family could not find it within their hearts to support Linda.
“I'm the villain,” she said later. “I'm the bad person. I shouldn't have turned her in. You shouldn't have. You shouldn 't have.”
At one family event one of the relatives made it a point to remind Linda that “ignorance is bliss.”
But she knew.
“Because they didn't do something right away, I've paid a price,” she told a friend.
What stunned Linda even more was that so many knew for so long. Mothers knew. Fathers knew.
“Mary Kay was the golden girl, all right,” she said later.
One evening in mid-January Linda Gardner got a call from a girlfriend.
“Linda, you'll never guess who I saw at the Super Mall. Mary Kay Letourneau.”
The woman who had started the ball rolling with her call to Child Protective Services and the school district was all ears when the caller said she actually tailed Mary Kay for a while just to see what she was doing at the mammoth discount mall on the outskirts of Auburn. She was with another woman, whom Linda deduced must have been her good friend Abby, the wife of the lawyer.
According to what the friend said, Mary Kay had been walking around in a cloud “la la la la, wanting people to notice her. In fact, she was in one of the designer stores, you know, saying 'I've been out of fashion for about six months, what's in now?' “
For Mary Kay's old Normandy Park neighbors, there had been little contact with the Letourneau children once Steve took them to Alaska for a fresh start, out of the fray. Ellen Douglas and her son, Scott, were among the only neighbors to see the kids in their new household up north. A Boy Scout event brought mother and son to Anchorage, and a visit to the townhouse Steve now shared with flight attendant Kelly Whalen was wanted very much by all sides. It was January 1997, and the television played scenes from the Winter Olympics. The townhouse was immaculate, not a speck of dust anywhere.
“Sunset magazine could do a spread,” Ellen said later.
She watched Jacqueline run around the off-white carpet carrying an open box of grape Jell-0 without a reprimand from anyone.
Don't fall with that mix, Jackie, Ellen thought.
But the place was calm. The kids seemed happy and relaxed. No one talked about Mary Kay and what might happen now that she was free to start her life over. Ellen liked Kelly, she seemed caring and involved and she provided the kind of order that their mother never possessed.