She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [133]
“I’m not telling you over the phone. ‘Cause you’ll just go and tell Justin and everybody else, right?”
“No,” Kristina said.
“What?”
“No.”
After a momentary pause, Celeste said, “I hired somebody to kill Tracey.”
Chapter
17
I hired someone to kill Tracey. The words echoed in Kristina’s mind. Suddenly, so many things became clear. She’d spent a lifetime yearning for a storybook mother, loving and kind. Instead she’d been born to Celeste, who’d told Jennifer and Christopher, “I could physically kill Kristina.” She’d even bought them both caskets. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Celeste might have planned for them. For the first time, Kristina believed her mother was capable of anything, even murder. And if that were true, it wasn’t hard to conclude she was behind Steve’s death. Tracey Tarlton squeezed the trigger, but Kristina realized her mother must have put her up to it.
When Kris told Christopher about the tape and her mother’s words, he said, “You need to talk to Jen.”
“I think Mom murdered Steve,” she told her twin when they met.
Finally, Jennifer thought. Finally you understand.
“I do, too,” Jen said. “Kristina, we have to tell the police, and we can’t go home. We can never talk to Celeste, never see her again.”
Kristina nodded. “I know,” she said.
The two sisters held each other and cried, over their lost childhoods and a mother who’d never known how to love them.
The following day the twins told Anita what they now believed, that Celeste was behind Steve’s murder. At first Anita seemed doubtful. Her faith had been shaken in Celeste when she learned that rather than going to Timberlawn, as she’d told her, she had gone to New Orleans to party with Donna Goodson. Still, lying about where she went was a long way from murder. Yet, as the girls talked, things started to make sense. She’d noticed how Steve always got drunk when they visited him at home, and he didn’t when they were at a restaurant. When the girls told her about the Everclear and sleeping pills, she saw the explanation. Then they asked her what had happened to the $30,000 in Social Security money Celeste had invested with her for them.
“Mom said you lost all our money in the stock market,” Kristina said. “Did you?”
“No,” Anita said, pulling out the file from a drawer. There, they saw recorded the withdrawal their mother had made; at a time when she was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes and jewels for herself, Celeste had emptied their accounts.
If the money had been there, it might have served as a cushion, to help them hide. But it was gone. The girls were frightened. Where would they go? How would they live? Being on the run would take money, and they had none. It was then that Kristina decided to do something she’d later regret. Months earlier, Celeste had told them they could have the money from the sale of Steve’s Cadillac, to invest and use to pay tuition. Earlier that month, Kristina had sold the car for $21,000. Over the coming days, Kristina would write checks against a joint checking account she had with Celeste for that sum, money she and Jennifer could use to hide.
Just days later, at four-fifteen, on the afternoon of Friday, April 7, Bill Mange walked into the lobby at the D.A.’s Office to greet Christopher for the interview he had scheduled. Instead, he found not only Christopher and his attorney, but Justin with his attorney, and both Kristina and Jennifer with their attorney.
“We all want to tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “And I’d like to go first.”
“Let’s get started,” Mange said.
That day and the days that followed, the prosecutor let the teens tell their stories. Then he slowly questioned each about specific points. With Christopher, the interview took little over an hour. For the first time, Mange heard about Celeste’s bizarre behavior the night of the shooting, from sending them to the lake house, to dropping off Meagan and ordering them not to mention Tracey’s name. “I thought Celeste was involved from the beginning,” Christopher said. “Lots of things