She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [113]
Soon after, Celeste’s mind, too, had turned to the issue of money.
Just after nine that morning she called Chuck Fuqua at home. “Steve’s really sick, and I need to get on his bank account,” she said.
“I can’t do that,” Chuck said. “Not without a new signature card.”
“What if Steve signs a signature card?” she asked. “He wants me on there so I can take care of the bills.”
Remembering all the times she’d forged Steve’s name, Fuqua said, “If we can independently verify that it’s his signature, yes, we can do it.”
When he hung up the phone he thought, Well, she found some way to finish him off.
At 11:30 A.M., Steve’s blood pressure dropped to 80 over 60. He wheezed and tossed uncomfortably in bed. He was disoriented, his breathing was shallow, and his heart raced at 140 beats per minute.
“You need to come home,” Justin said when he called Jennifer in Houston, where she was with Christopher attending his great aunt’s funeral. “Steve’s taken a turn for the worse.”
She and Christopher left the funeral and immediately drove west to Austin.
While his doctors treated Steve, Celeste fumed about HealthSouth, blaming the infection on poor care she said he’d received there. She even called the social worker at the facility. “There may be a lawsuit if he dies,” she threatened.
As bad as Steve looked, and as concerned as the doctors appeared, Kristina didn’t believe he would die. She kept remembering what Dr. Handley had said and about how many times Steve had been sick before and recovered. She’d already lost one father, and she couldn’t grasp the possibility that she could lose another.
“Hello, Elise,” Kristina heard Steve whisper. It gave her the chills. He’s just confused, she thought.
Dr. Coscia wasn’t at the hospital that day. With Steve in increasing respiratory distress, the doctor on duty ordered an infectious disease consult. The infectious disease doctor feared Steve suffered from septic shock, a rampaging and often fatal infection. “We’re going to move your husband to the ICU,” a nurse told Celeste at one-forty that afternoon. “Why don’t you all go get some lunch and then go there to see him?”
After a night at his bedside, they were tired, and Kristina, Justin, and Celeste did as the nurse suggested. They drove to a nearby restaurant called the Brick Oven. In the car, Celeste called someone she told them was Dawn and talked to her throughout lunch. Later, Tracey would say that she was on the telephone with Celeste, her own pulse racing when she realized that if Steve died, she could soon be charged with murder.
Meanwhile at the hospital, at 2:31 that afternoon, a nurse and an aide wheeled Steve into the ICU on a gurney. By then his heart fluttered at a dangerous 162 beats per minute, his breathing was shallow, and his oxygen levels were low.
Four minutes later his pulse dropped to 60. And moments afterward his exhausted heart simply stopped.
In the minutes that followed, the ICU staff converged on Steve’s bed. They intubated him, putting a tube down into his throat and pumping oxygen into his lungs. They gave him shots of epinephrine to stimulate his heart, then gave him CPR and jolted him with paddles to electrify his heart to beat.
It didn’t work.
At 3:15 P.M., Steven Beard Jr. was officially declared dead.
The cause noted on his chart: septic shock, overwhelming infection.
“Are you the Beard family?” a nurse asked when they returned to the hospital.
“Yes,” Celeste said.
She pulled them to the side, into a private room. “I’m sorry, we did all we could,” she said. “But we couldn’t save him.”
Celeste let out a shriek that echoed off the walls and down the hospital corridors. Inconsolable, she screamed and cried until a doctor ordered her taken to an empty room and given Haldol to calm her. In the darkness, they laid her on a gurney.
“Steve’s dead,” Justin said when he called Jennifer on her cell phone. He caught her and Christopher rushing back from Houston. At that point Jennifer cried and Christopher pulled over to comfort her. They no longer had a reason to