She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [15]
Lue, too, was frightened, but for a different reason. Celeste drove at breakneck speeds and had one wreck after another. The nine-year-olds were terrified as their mother careened around corners. When a check-engine light came on in the yellow Taurus, Celeste screamed, “The car’s going to explode.”
The twins panicked as she shouted to hold onto the doors. “Be ready to jump,” Celeste ordered, but nothing ever happened. Years later Jennifer remembered holding so tight her knuckles turned white, terrified they would all die. “I think she did it so we’d be quiet,” she says. “We were so scared, and she laughed like it was all a joke.”
At night Celeste left the girls alone in the apartment and partied. Hour after hour they waited for her return. “From when I was little on, what I remember most about being with her was that I was always hungry,” says Jennifer. “She spent money on herself and never had any for food.”
Despite all she’d learned about Celeste, Lue still thought of her as a daughter, and there were things she could never imagine she was capable of. That winter, the girls seemed afraid of their mother, and after much prodding, they told Lue why. Celeste, they said, ground something up and put it in their food, something that made them sleep. The girls begged Lue not to tell their mother. She agreed. While Lue found the conversation disturbing, she suspected it was nothing more than overactive childish imaginations.
Years later Kristina would have other memories of her mother: days an angry Celeste hit them with wooden spoons so hard they broke. And when Kristina suffered unexplained seizures, Celeste rarely visited her in the hospital. In the evenings, Kris called the apartment, but it was her sister, Jen, home alone, who answered. Those nights, Kris fell asleep watching the Cosby Show and wishing for a mother like Claire Huxtable, one who loved her children.
In 1990, Celeste reported the yellow Taurus stolen. When the insurance money came in, she purchased a brand new Thunderbird.
That summer, Celeste’s landlord called Lue complaining about unsanitary conditions in the apartment. More and more, Kristina and Jennifer were alone and burdened with cleaning and cooking. Kristina even ironed the white tuxedo shirts from Celeste’s waitress uniforms. In the mornings, waking Celeste was an unhappy task. She cursed and shouted. “I never woke her up when she didn’t make me feel bad,” says Kristina.
That fall, someone reported Celeste to Maricopa County’s Children’s Protective Services, and the girls were taken away. Despite the abysmal conditions they lived in, Kristina and Jennifer cried. “That was the last time I let myself care about her,” says Jennifer. “From then on I couldn’t love her, because she didn’t love Kristina and me.”
Not long after, police found the charred remnants of the Taurus in the desert outside Phoenix. Excited, Celeste asked Lue to bring her video camera and drive to the site with her. Once there, she filmed the car’s blackened skeleton and giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Lue asked.
“I burned it,” Celeste answered with a wide grin. “I did it for the insurance.”
“You’re going to get caught, honey,” Lue said. “You can’t do things like that.”
“People do it all the time,” Celeste scoffed. “It was a piece of crap.”
Perhaps Lue should have thought of that day when, weeks later, on October 14, Celeste called, crying. The Thompsons were in California, where they’d just returned to Gary’s mother’s house after a funeral. “Someone robbed your house!” Celeste screamed into the telephone. “They took a bunch of your stuff and my things.”
When they arrived the next day, Lue realized how much was gone. They’d lost the television and VCR, as well as family heirlooms, including silver candlesticks and Lue’s late mother’s jewelry, Gary’s class ring, even silver dollars commemorating their children’s births. The point of entry was a single, small, neat cut in the back door screen.
“This was done by someone you know,” an officer