She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [135]
“I’m not strong enough to say no to her,” Kristina told Mange. “She’d tell me her side and I’d believe her. I can’t risk that.”
“Then hide,” he said. Writing down his home phone number on the back of his business card, he handed it to her. “And call me if you need help.”
After they left, Mange considered what he’d just learned: Celeste had a contract on Tracey’s life. He walked to the office of Rosemary Lehmberg, the first assistant district attorney. “You have to let Tracey know,” she said. “She has to be protected.”
Mange put in a call for Wines. After they talked, the phone rang in the office of Keith Hampton, Tracey’s attorney. “We have reason to believe your client’s life is in danger, that there may be a hit out on Ms. Tarlton,” Wines said. “We’ll have police drive by to check on her house, but you need to warn her to watch her back.”
When Tracey heard, she called Celeste.
“It’s the twins,” Celeste told her. “They’re mad at you for killing their father. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
The next day, Celeste and Tracey met at their bench in the park. Celeste was distraught and crying. “The girls have turned me in,” she said. Tracey had just learned someone wanted to kill her, yet she found herself comforting Celeste, who rambled on about the girls and the atrocities that were taking over her life. On top of everything, she claimed she had breast cancer. “I’m going to go to California to live with my sister, Caresse,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll come back.”
The months since the shooting had been a hell for Tracey. She was plagued by guilt and feared each time the phone rang that it would be more bad news. She missed Celeste and she worried about her. To Tracey, it appeared her lover was slowly crumbling under the weight of what they had done. And now cancer.
“I understand,” Tracey said.
“I should hire a hitman to kill Tracey Tarlton,” Celeste said to her therapist a few days later. “She’s ruined my life.”
“Celeste, don’t go there,” Hauser told her. “That’s not good judgment.”
Throughout the session, Celeste raged against what she described as the treachery of the twins. They’d stolen money and jewelry, she claimed. “I’m embarrassed that they’re lying and committing crimes. It reflects on me, as a mother.”
“I think you ought to go back to Timberlawn,” Hauser said. Celeste agreed, and left a few days later.
At Timberlawn, Gotway tried to disarm the hatred overflowing from Celeste toward the twins. At times she cried, saying she feared that they had fled from her life forever as she’d fled from her own mother. Other times, she succumbed to verbal rampages, blaming them, especially Kristina, for all of her problems.
She wrote the twins a letter: “I’m typing this letter to you because I can no longer write. I am falling a lot, too … I understand that you are growing up and want to be on your own. I can accept that. I can’t accept your hiding from me. You both are tearing me up inside … I verbally abused you and I am deeply sorry. I was hoping you would be an adult, accept my apology and realize that I was sick. It will never happen again … If I do not hear from you by Friday, I will know that the path you chose is to be out of my life. You will leave me no choice but to cancel your insurance, gas cards, phones, and OnStar … I love you more than anything and would do absolutely anything for you… I love you both,”
The signature was barely a scratch, “Mom.”
Twelve days after she checked back into Timberlawn, Celeste returned to Austin. By then nothing in her world was the same. While she was gone, Donna Goodson had packed her possessions into her Buick Regal and taken off for Florida. “I figured I was next,” she says. “I was scared shitless Celeste would hire someone to kill me.”
Her fears were no less real than the twins’.
“Your mother says she has the gun loaded and she’s going to kill herself tonight if you don’t go home,” Peggy Farley, Kristina’s