She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [162]
“You could say that my stake would be for justice,” Justin shot back.
“For justice or for Justin?” the defense attorney countered.
Jennifer felt her mother’s eyes on her when she took the stand. At twenty-three years old, she’d grown into a woman. Still, a chill ran through her. She, more than anyone, understood her mother’s wrath. The trial promised the end of their ordeal; yet Jennifer felt only dread. She and Kristina had discussed what they would do if their mother were acquitted— they’d run. Celeste, they felt certain, would hunt them down. And if she found them? “She’d kill us,” Jennifer says.
So that day on the stand, Jennifer concentrated on Ellen Halbert’s face in the gallery and on the attorneys’ questions. The one person she couldn’t bear to look at was Celeste. Throughout her testimony, as Jennifer talked about the horrors of her childhood, her mother took her stricken pose, tucking her chin against her shoulder, as if to shrink behind the defense table. Every so often, however, she looked up. When she did, Celeste’s eyes flashed rage.
“Who took you to the foster home in Arizona and left you there?” asked Wetzel.
“Celeste,” Jennifer replied. While the jury had already heard much about Celeste’s life with Steve, what Jennifer filled in was who her mother had been before she’d married him, the woman who flitted from marriage to marriage, dragging along two small daughters, unless they became inconvenient, at which times she shuttled them off to be cared for by whichever state she was currently in.
“What was the Sunday suck?”
“Celeste giving Steve a blow job,” Jennifer replied.
Through her testimony, the entire tawdry picture of Celeste’s life came into focus. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond this woman, not shocking her teenagers with talk of sex nor bedding her ex-husband after drugging her current one. As Jennifer added to the texture of the prior testimony about events on the night of the shooting, one thing came through clearly. While they disagreed about small things, including who said Tracey’s name first, the teens were consistent about what had happened that night, including that Celeste had not been at Toro Canyon at midnight.
Another thing became clear as Jennifer talked: When Celeste told her to do something, she didn’t ask why.
“Did you ask Celeste why you weren’t to mention Tracey’s name?” Wetzel asked.
“No. I was afraid to. She would be upset.”
“And that would scare you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you meet your mother alone?”
“I was afraid to. Little things kept adding up.” Before long Wetzel had artfully led Jennifer through what frightened her, including the pink-lined caskets.
During cross exam, DeGuerin grilled Jennifer. “When did you start calling your mother Celeste?” he charged. “Was it when you were suing her over Steve’s money?”
“No.”
“You refuse today to call your mother your mother?” he said, flushed with fury.
Wetzel jumped up and objected. Judge Kocurek sustained her objection, and DeGuerin fumed. After a pause, he said, “You didn’t like Steve, did you?”
“That’s not true.”
But then he said some things that struck home for Jennifer. “You laughed at him getting drunk, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said sadly.
“Not to his face but behind his back.”
“Yes,” she said again. Now, with Steve dead, she regretted those actions. At the time, she had been a teenager making fun of an adult.
The prosecutors had laid it all before the jury. In fits and starts, they’d heard about hamburger night and the way Tracey kissed Celeste; the graduation party at Jimmy’s house and finding Tracey on top of Celeste. DeGuerin did what he could, objecting, flustering, accusing. Jennifer and Kristina were kept by the bank, he suggested. Earlier he’d accused the bankers of depriving Celeste of her own money, by not funding the trust. Now he asked how Jennifer and Kristina managed to not only live but buy cars and an Austin triplex.
“We work, and we got a loan,” Jennifer said.
Still, at times, she seemed shaken. On