03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (17 page)

The weeks were so busy she had little time for Steve. The following Friday she and Tracey met Pat and Jane at the City Grill to celebrate Tracey’s birthday. Celeste brought a present, a beautiful stainless steel watch, and a card. The standard Hallmark variety, the greeting card bore a flowered heart and the words: “A
Birthday Message for the One I Love.”
The inside verse read: “For
bringing love to my world …And happiness to my heart …For making every day seem like a special dream come true …I hope your birthday and the year to come is filled with everything wonderful. Happy Birthday.”

She signed it:
“Love, Celeste.”

Celeste gave Pat, who was celebrating her own birthday, a hundred-dollar gift certificate to an upscale hardware store. That night, Celeste and Tracey were animated, talking about their plans to attend Tracey’s niece’s wedding in Atlanta.

“I told her she doesn’t have to come,” Tracey said. “These family things aren’t fun.”

“I want to be there,” Celeste insisted.

That she spent so little time with Steve must have gnawed at him. The next night, he was in a foul mood. When he woke up about 10:00
P.M
., the twins were out and, for once, Celeste was home asleep. Nearly every light in the house was on. It was a minor thing, but he was a careful man who had a routine, walking through the house at bedtime to turn off lights and arm the security system. To him, it must have seemed an insult.

Angry and hurt, he shouted at Celeste, challenging her to go back to Dallas. As he saw it, she didn’t intend to spend any time with him. Enraged, Celeste left and drove back a day early. The following morning he called her at the Sumner Suites, saying that if she wanted a divorce she could have one. He was through with the marriage. That day, she wrote him a letter, blaming him for the incident. Although she spiked his cocktails, she wrote, “I
think your drinking is out of control.”
Then she begged him:
“Steve, I love you with all of my heart. If you truly want a divorce, then please tell me on Thursday when we meet with Dr. Gotway. I will have shown him a copy of this letter, so that he is apprised as to our current status. Please don’t have me served while I am in the hospital. Tell me face to face on Thursday. I think I at least deserve that much. Love, Celeste.”

It was a tactic that had worked well in the past. When Harald refused to marry her, she’d taken him to a counselor who had urged him to trust her. The following day, Steve called Gotway, maintaining he didn’t really want a divorce but that Celeste avoided him. Gotway suggested Steve calm down and think about his actions, that perhaps it wasn’t the time to make such a drastic decision.

In Austin, Celeste dominated Tracey’s thoughts. Whether at work or at home with her dog, Wren, she couldn’t get her out
of her mind. Days after Steve talked with Gotway, Tracey mailed Celeste a card. On the front were two women and a dog. Inside she wrote: “I
woke up missing you with a fever better reserved for the dying. I woke up missing you and nothing I could do would shake it. Feeling like that, I would lie down and die just to smell your skin…I love you.
T.”

At BookPeople, Tracey combed the shelves and mailed Celeste books on sex, especially those that discussed putting past abuse behind to enjoy a healthy sex life. In a card, she expressed her discontent with the way Celeste pulled back before orgasm: “I
want to be part of your healing as we, together, explore ways to make you comfortable being intimate with me. I love you, T.”

Steve, too, must have wondered about Celeste’s sexuality, but for different reasons. One afternoon, on a weekend when she was home, he came right out and asked her something that must have been percolating within him for months, perhaps because he’d heard her talk so much of Tracey.

“Celeste, are you a lesbian?” he asked.

“I can’t believe you asked me that,” she shrieked. Then she got in the car and left, driving back to Timberlawn, where she didn’t have to answer to him.

The following weekend, on Friday, May 21, Tracey flew into Atlanta and attended her niece’s rehearsal dinner. Celeste joined her the next day. In the wedding photos, Celeste looked prim and proper in a light blue suit with matching buttons. Her blond hair was swept up, bangs brushed her forehead, and tendrils hung down her cheeks. She wore a blue sapphire pendant, and her diamond ring glistened on her hand.

Weeks before, Celeste had taken Tracey to the St. Thomas shop at Austin’s posh Arboretum to choose the black suit she wore that day. An Armani, it cost $1,200, well above
Tracey’s budget on her $55,000 salary. “It was an expense the old Tracey wouldn’t even have considered,” says Pat. “But with Celeste, there were no boundaries.”

The wedding went well, and at the reception Tracey felt her family was accepting Celeste as her new girlfriend. But that night, when they went to the hotel bar, they hooked up with a group from the wedding and before long Celeste became the life of the party. She bragged about her rich husband, telling the women that her blue suit cost $2,200, then matched the men drink for drink, until she was visibly drunk. With the men in the bar egging her on, she opened her blouse and flashed her breasts. Embarrassed, Tracey urged Celeste to follow her upstairs to their hotel room. “Don’t worry about these people,” Tracey whispered to Celeste. “It doesn’t matter.”

At BookPeople, Tracey’s staff had come to recognize Celeste, coming and going from the store. When she was in Austin on the weekends, she dropped by often, stopping on the fourth floor, where she’d walk into Tracey’s office and close the door. Often, Celeste called. If someone were with her, Tracey waved them off and closed the door behind them. None doubted that the two women were lovers.

Twice a year Tracey threw a party for her managers. In the past it had always been at her house on Wilson, a casual affair consisting of deli trays and a keg of beer. The talk was about books and concerts, and the mood relaxed. In July, Tracey told Celeste she planned to throw a summer party, and Celeste had an idea.

“Let’s do it at the lake house, and I’ll do it for you,” she said.

Tracey wasn’t sure; a full thirty-five miles from Austin, without speeding, it took nearly an hour down winding roads
to get there, and after dark the turns were easy to miss. But Celeste insisted, and Tracey gave in.

Invitations went out announcing:
“Tracey’s ‘Fashion-Victim Party,’ Come dressed in your fashion don’t and spend the evening laughing and cavorting with your coworkers. Friday, July 9, 1999, at the Beard Retreat, 101 Bedford Drive, Spicewood, TX.”
It was an odd fit for a group that cared more about literature than fashion, but Tracey didn’t question Celeste’s concept. Spending thousands, Celeste hired a caterer, a bartender, and even a photographer. Guests arrived early that evening, and the first found Celeste and Tracey dressing. Another walked in a bedroom and discovered the two women kissing. Without saying a word, she backed out of the room.

Music blared and the hot tub churned as the bartender served drinks and waiters passed trays of hors d’oeuvres. Earlier in the week Celeste had asked Tracey to arrange for one of the women to bring marijuana brownies, even giving her money to pay for the marijuana. When they arrived, she took the plate and placed it on the table with the other food. Fueled by the pot, Celeste was in a grandiose mood. That night, Cindy Light, the same photographer who’d shot pictures at Steve and Celeste’s open house on Toro Canyon, snapped photos of Celeste on Tracey’s lap, a vodka in one hand and a brownie in the other, along with pictures of the two women dancing, nuzzling, and kissing.

About eleven, Tracey and Celeste walked into the master bedroom and locked the door. As their guests partied outside, Celeste whispered, “After Steve’s dead, we can live here together and wake up together each morning.”

It was something Tracey dreamed of: to live freely with the woman she loved.

The crowd had already cleared out the following morning
when Kristina and Justin arrived to clean up, as Celeste had ordered. The tables were covered with half-f glasses and overflowing ashtrays. The bedroom door was locked and the house quiet. Wanting to wake Celeste, they opened and closed doors, but heard no one stir, so they left and drove to a convenience store to buy breakfast burritos they ate next to the lake. When they returned, the bedroom door was unlocked. Appearing to be naked under the covers, Tracey and Celeste lay together in bed, their heads touching. Silently, the teens left the room.

Minutes later Celeste and Tracey emerged, Celeste laughing about the party. “I can’t believe I ate all those pot brownies,” she said.

There’d been other indications that summer that the relationship between the two women wasn’t platonic, but Kristina hadn’t wanted to address them. Even the sight of them in bed which she’d seen before, was something she refused to consider. But the night they went to a movie together, she was once again confronted with it.

That evening, she and Justin went with Tracey and Celeste to see
The Love Letter,
directed by the actress Kate Capshaw. The plot centered on a found love letter. The teens grew bored and left. Later, Celeste and Tracey emerged laughing.

“How was the movie?” Kristina asked.

“The plot was, ‘Oh relax, your mother’s a lesbian,’” Celeste said, and laughed.

“Is that a hint?” Kristina asked Justin when they were alone. For months he’d been prodding her, but she hadn’t wanted to confront what was obvious: that Celeste and Tracey were lovers.

“It could be,” he said.

Not for the first time, Kristina was ambivient about it. She liked Tracey, after all. More than once when Celeste screamed
for reasons that included not liking the way she and Jennifer looked at her, Tracey defended them. It cost dearly, as Celeste then turned her wrath on Tracey instead of the girls, but she never backed down. Tracey had grown to respect Kristina, too. She saw her as an old soul, a girl who was more woman than her mother. She also found the relationship between the mother and daughter intriguing. Wherever Celeste went, whether the beauty parlor or her appointments with her therapist, Kristina nearly always checked on her, just to make sure she was all right.

“It was like there was an unsevered umbilical cord,” says Tracey.

In many ways, Tracey made Kristina’s life easier. She was someone Celeste trusted and counted on, filling the space Kristina had always occupied—as her mother’s keeper. With Celeste busy, for the first time the girls did the things normal teenagers take for granted. “Everyone goes to movies, but to us it was a big deal,” says Jennifer. “Mom never gave us the time off to do that before.”

Tracey was also someone who took the responsibility for Celeste’s survival off Kristina. By that summer, although she’d kept her hotel room, Celeste was in Dallas infrequently. At times, when she was home, she’d languish in bed all day, saying she was depressed. When Kristina couldn’t get her up and dressed, she called Tracey. Twice while Steve was away from the house, Tracey went to Toro Canyon to coax Celeste from bed. “I can’t stand living with him. Death would be a relief,” Celeste told her.

Whenever Celeste talked of suicide, Tracey’s chest clamped up, like someone had a stranglehold on her heart.

As July drew to a close, Steve must have felt the end of his days as a single dad were finally in sight. After three months, Celeste was checking out of Timberlawn and coming home.
Through it all, she’d maintained that she loved him and wanted to be with him. On Father’s Day she even gave him a beautiful sapphire ring. Maybe he believed she truly loved him, for that summer he told a friend, “All we need is time together to reconnect.”

The Friday she took the twins and Amy to Dallas to help her move out of the Sumner Suites, however, she had no intention of leaving without one last fling. Telling Steve they were spending the weekend at Six Flags, an amusement park with acres of roller coasters and rides, she didn’t mention that Justin and Christopher were going along, or that she’d invited Jimmy Martinez and his two nieces.

The ride there was a wild one; Celeste sped along the highway in the Expedition while Jimmy and his nieces followed. She was in one of her wild, talkative moods, entertaining the teens with stories, then rattling off her ex-husbands’ social security numbers, like the answers to unasked Trivial Pursuit questions. She even dropped an enticing tidbit none of them had heard before: She said she’d had a secret husband—one she had never even told the twins about. “We were married just a couple of weeks and then had it annulled,” Celeste said. The teens were intrigued, yet it was something else Celeste said that day that later resonated for Amy.

“You know, when Steve dies, I’ll play the part. I’ll cry and mourn,” she said, laughing as if the thought of his death filled her with delight. “I’m such a good actress that no one will ever suspect that I never loved him.”

Not long after they returned home to Austin, Celeste called Tracey and asked her to do something for her. “Buy some Everclear,” she said. “Kristina’s bringing Steve’s vodka bottles over. Pour out half the vodka and fill them up.”

At the time, Tracey thought little about it. After all, Celeste
had been spiking Steve’s drinks for years, and she wasn’t the one handing him the cocktails. Later, that day would seem more significant. She’d recognize it as the first time Celeste enlisted her aid in her quest to hasten Steve to his grave.

F
or nearly six months Steve had put his own life on
hold to care for Celeste and the girls. Perhaps he thought the doctors at Timberlawn would make them a whole, healthy family. Now that she was home and on medication for her depression, he tried to return their lives to some version of normalcy. Perhaps, despite his five years with her, he didn’t realize that with Celeste there was no such thing as “normal.”

Through all the upheaval of the spring, the shopping center had thrived and the second phase, Davenport II, was under construction. The tenants included Tramex Travel, a small agency with branches across Austin. There, one afternoon, Steve approached Stacy Sadler, a young travel agent with strawberry blond hair, to plan a trip. Not just any trip, he said, but the best they had to offer. Stacy had booked two other trips for Steve that year—one to the Florida Keys and another to Cuba—both of which had to be cancelled because of Celeste’s hospitalization. Although the relationship started out rocky, Steve pushing Stacy at every turn, she’d
gradually realized he enjoyed teasing her, and she’d grown fond of him. “I found myself hoping that this time things worked out for him,” she says. “He said this would be his trip of a lifetime.”

From her files, Stacy retrieved a stack of brochures on the Rolls Royce of touring companies, Abercrombie and Kent. The possible destinations ranged from Antarctica to the Galapagos to Thailand. Steve didn’t have anything so exotic in mind. He’d already decided the trip would be romantic and luxurious.

Days later, after poring over the possible destinations, Steve and Stacy designed a customized grand tour of Europe. He and Celeste would spend October traveling the Continent, to Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Lucerne, Bern, Dijon, Paris, London, York, Scotland, Stratford on Avon, and Dublin. They’d journey in private limousines with chauffeurs, eat at the best restaurants, and stay in only the finest hotels. Such extravagance carried a $53,000 price tag. To Steve, the trip may have had a special import. “It’ll be an opportunity for us to get to know each other again,” he told a friend. Left unsaid was that if they couldn’t, he might finally admit the marriage was a mistake.

“You’ll want the insurance, Mr. Beard,” Stacy advised. “If you can’t go, you won’t want to be out so much money.”

Steve thought about it for just a moment, then said, firmly, “No. I’m going. No matter what, I’m going. This time we won’t be cancelling.”

Celeste may have known what was riding on the trip. When he came home with the itinerary and brochures, instead of excitement she expressed dread. “I can’t spend an entire month with him,” she told the twins. “This will be torture.”

From that point on, her aversion to Steve grew. She wanted him out of her life. But how could that happen and not cost her his fortune?

“If that old bastard died, he’d be out of the way,” she told Tracey. “Then we could be together, forever.”

Justin often arrived at the Toro Canyon house that summer to find Celeste giggling and watching
Serial Mom,
in which Kathleen Turner played a suburban housewife who kills a neighbor for not separating her recyclables. It happened so often, he bought her the DVD. At night, after Steve passed out, she told the teens to drop her at Tracey’s, where the two women drank, talked, and made love. Yet, it was far from a carefree relationship. At times Celeste flared up, screaming at Tracey with little or no provocation. Stunned, Tracey fought memories of her mother’s verbal barrages.

In bed on those nights, Celeste lay stiff and unresponsive. Unable to sleep, Tracey wondered why she wanted such an unsatisfying relationship with a married woman who had to sneak out to see her. Too often, with Celeste busy with Steve and the twins, she was alone and lonely. But there was that other side of Celeste, the charming and giving side. Celeste constantly surprised her, showing up at unexpected moments, bringing small gifts, and telling her that she loved her. Mornings after their arguments, she awoke to find Celeste curled against her, warm and loving.

When Tracey considered ending the affair, she worried that Celeste would have no one to talk her through the dangerous times. One day, for instance, Celeste drove down the road with the twins in the car, on their way home from the lake house. She screamed—why, they didn’t know—and drove across lanes and onto the shoulder. Furious, she called Tracey. “Do you have a gun?” she shouted. “I’m coming over, and we’re going to kill ourselves.”

At the Toro Canyon house she told Steve, “I don’t have to take shit from these girls. I’m going to kill myself.” She left, and Steve paced the house, waiting for her to return.

At her house on Wilson, Tracey poured her lover a vodka from the bottle of Stoli she kept for her on a shelf and listened to her rave. When Celeste returned home the next morning, she acted as if nothing had happened.

Despite the turmoil she’d brought to her life, like Steve, Tracey thought Celeste was worth the effort, and she was willing to work to try to make the relationship better. When she told Celeste she wanted the two of them to go for counseling to work through their problems, Celeste agreed. Within days Tracey had a couple’s session scheduled for July 21 with Barbara Grant, the therapist she’d gone to when she first left Timberlawn.

“I don’t think I’m really a lesbian,” Celeste told Grant that day. “I have to drink to have sex with Tracey.”

In the therapist’s office, Tracey listened. For months she’d been sexually involved with Celeste, and now her lover questioned whether she was attracted to her. Instead of anger, Tracey just smiled. She’d been in relationships with straight women before. “Was Celeste a lesbian? I don’t know,” she says. “What I knew was that she was sleeping with me.”

Tracey explained that she worried about their relationship. “Neither of us have good track records. Both of us have been through lots of partners,” she told the therapist. “We’ve got a lot invested emotionally. And I think we both want this to work.”

Complicating matters, Celeste had plans to be gone much of the summer and fall, first on a driving trip to the Northwest with Steve, the twins and their boyfriends, then to Australia with the girls as a graduation trip, and in October, the month in Europe. “Celeste said when she got back, things would change,” says Tracey. “Celeste was always promising things would get better, and I always believed her.”

The trip to Washington State had a special purpose for Celeste: to comb through a storage shed in Stanwood that held Craig’s possessions, where the girls hoped to retrieve mementoes from their father. Steve had outlined a route from Austin, through Salt Lake into California, up to Oregon and into Washington. Then, after completing their task, they’d loop up to British Colombia and backtrack through Phoenix to Texas and home. At first they planned to drive in two cars, the teens in the Expedition and Celeste and Steve in his Cadillac. That was something Celeste didn’t want.

“I can’t be alone with him,” she told Kristina. “This isn’t going to happen.”

Somehow she convinced Steve to trade in the Expedition for a white Suburban equipped with a television and VCR. He had it parked in front of the house when his neighbor, Dr. Dennison, sauntered over to take a look. “It’s got all the bells and whistles,” Steve said proudly. “One hell of a machine.”

They left early the morning after Celeste and Tracey’s counseling session. Steve, Celeste, Jennifer, Christopher, Justin, and Kristina were in the brand new truck with their luggage in a rooftop carrier. On the road, Celeste moaned that Steve drove too slowly. “Speed it up,” she said. “We’ll never get there.”

The trip turned into an arduous one for the teens, as Celeste, keyed up in the second row of seats, glared at Steve for driving the speed limit. As the road climbed into higher altitudes, Christopher drove and Steve sat beside him in a second captain’s chair, his oxygen machine on to prevent altitude sickness. When he fell asleep, Celeste turned it off and lit a cigarette. When he asked for his medicine pack with his asthma medications, she threw them out the window and handed him sleeping pills instead.

“We didn’t like it,” says Justin. “But we didn’t say anything. None of us did.”

One morning in Ogden, Utah, Celeste ordered Kristina to smash up sleeping pills for her to slip into Steve’s food. Kristina refused, but Celeste kept after her. “Just do it!” she screamed. Finally, Kristina did as she was told, sobbing as she ground them down to a powder. At the breakfast table, while Steve went to the rest room, Celeste poured some of the white powder into his orange juice.

When he sat down and took a sip, he grimaced. “This tastes funny,” he said, looking for a waitress. “I’m going to send it back.”

“Don’t be wasteful. Drink it,” Celeste cajoled him.

Steve looked at her and drank it down. “Happy now?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

Minutes after they got in the car, he fell asleep. At lunch at a Red Lobster, she mixed more of the powder into his cottage cheese. This time Steve passed out at the table, and Justin and Christopher had to help him to the car. Barely coherent, he urinated on himself. When Celeste saw the yellow stain on his pants, she ridiculed him.

Later, they’d remember the trip in the snapshots Justin took, especially one of Steve taken along the side of a road, leaning against a railing. He’d just woken up from a drugged sleep. “We had dinner at a Sizzler, and Celeste gave him more pills,” says Justin. “He passed out again.”

By the time they reached Seattle, Steve was convinced there was something wrong. He called his personal physician, Dr. Handley, who blamed it on altitude sickness. “You have to get to a lower altitude,” he said. “You’re not getting enough oxygen.”

At the airport, as Steve waited for a plane to Phoenix, he
handed Celeste a wad of cash and a Shell credit card for gas. She’d left Austin without her credit cards or driver’s license. She tucked it in her purse, kissed him good-bye, and, when they walked out into the parking lot, shouted with exhilaration. “He’s gone,” she screamed. “The fat old fuck is gone. Now we can make some time.”

Inside the Suburban, she tore the paper dealer’s license plate off the back window and dropped it on the floor. “If we get stopped, tell the cops it fell off,” she told the kids. Then she sat in the driver’s seat, stepped on the gas, and they were off, speeding along the mountain roads, with the teens laughing nervously and looking over the edge to see the steep drop to the valleys below.

In Stanwood, north of Seattle, they drove to the storage shed. Although retrieving Craig’s possessions was the reason for the trip, once there, Celeste was eager to leave. The girls had looked through their father’s things for only minutes when she shouted, “Let’s go.” Each grabbed small mementoes, and then they were back on the road, headed toward the ferry to Victoria, Canada. On the way they stopped at Craig’s old workshop at Twin City Foods. “Here, there’s a bunch of junk in there, old tools,” Celeste told one of his old friends, throwing him the keys. “You can have them.”

Kristina and Jennifer wanted to shout at her, telling her that wasn’t junk but all they had left of their father. Instead they said nothing.

On the way to Canada, Celeste pulled into an outlet mall. The wad of bills Steve gave her in Seattle waited to be spent, and she intended to do just that. In a Coach Leather shop, she bought shopping bags full of purses, spending nearly everything she had. Once they were hers, she threw them into the back of the Suburban, as if they meant nothing. At home she had hundreds more stacked in boxes,
many with the tags still on. From that point on they ate only what they could charge on the Shell credit card, junk food, sodas, hot dogs, and doughnuts. Although Justin and Christopher had money with them, Celeste wouldn’t allow them to spend it. Only one night, when they were all so hungry for real food that they were willing to argue with her, did she let them pay for a restaurant dinner. “It was just crazy,” says Justin. “You couldn’t talk to her. If you disagreed with her, she screamed, and Kristina would get so upset, it just wasn’t worth it.”

Three to four times a day they heard her talk to Tracey on her cell phone. Once she told the girls, “You’re in trouble,” then put Tracey on the telephone. Celeste had said they were disrespectful, and Tracey ordered them to “mind your mother.” Another time she called her hairdresser friend, Denise, laughing about how she’d drugged Steve. “He was driving me crazy,” she said. “He drove like an old man.”

While Christopher drove, Celeste sat beside him, talking. “I don’t expect Steve to live much longer, not with his age, weight, and health problems,” she said. “Then the money will be mine. I can travel, buy whatever I want.”

When they picked Steve up in Phoenix, Celeste was all smiles and asking how he was. He felt better, he said, and they loaded his suitcases into the Suburban and took off. Back in Austin, Celeste went to see Tracey at BookPeople. That night they slept together, and Tracey told Celeste about what had happened while she was gone. Drinking home alone, she’d grown depressed. She called her psychiatrist, who called in a suicide attempt on 911. By the time EMS arrived, her breathing was shallow. They released her the following day, after a night at the hospital. Tracey denied she’d tried to take her life, saying it was just a bad mix of her meds with alcohol. With her trip to Australia for the girls’ graduation
looming in just two days, the next day at her appointment with her therapist, Celeste was upset.

“I hope Tracey doesn’t kill herself and interrupt my trip,” she complained.

Earlier that summer Celeste had asked Tracey to order a book through BookPeople:
The Poisoner’s Handbook.
It arrived while she was on the trip west, and when Tracey gave it to her, Celeste handed it back. Inside was a recipe for botulism, a dangerous nerve toxin produced by a bacterium found in soil,
Clostridium botulinum.
“I want you to make it for me while I’m gone,” Celeste told her. “I’m going to feed it to Steve.”

Tracey protested, refusing, but Celeste argued that she didn’t expect her to feed it to him, just to grow the botulism while she was in Australia. “You’re not going to even be there,” she said. First Tracey had agreed to spike Steve’s vodka; now it seemed a small step to grow a dangerous poison.