She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [2]
By the time they arrived at the emergency room, Steve Beard had been wheeled on a gurney into surgery. His prospects weren’t good. “We don’t think he’ll survive the night,” a doctor told them.
Celeste sobbed as Kristina held her tight.
Minutes later in the hospital’s austere family waiting room, Kristina realized that for the first time since she’d awoken to flashing lights and a deep sense of foreboding, she was alone with her mother. Suddenly, Celeste stopped crying. Her blue eyes narrowed as she focused intently on her young daughter.
“Kristina, the police are going to ask who could have done this,” she said, her voice grave. “No matter what, don’t mention Tracey’s name.”
Chapter
1
Only months later would Kristina allow herself to consider why Celeste ordered her not to mention the name of Tracey Tarlton to the police, even though many times throughout that strange summer she wondered about the odd relationship between her mother and the bright, funny woman who managed a large Austin bookstore. From experience, the teenager knew not to question her mother. To do so would be judged by Celeste as a betrayal, and the consequences could be bone-chilling. Throughout her life, she’d feared yet loved her mother as only a child can love a parent, with utter devotion. Only long after Steve Beard’s cold body lay entombed in a rose-granite crypt did Kristina allow herself to wonder how much she truly knew about the woman she called “Mother.”
Even if Kristina could see into the past, Celeste might have remained a mystery. For like the woman Celeste became, the household she grew up in was filled with contradiction. On the outside, Edwin and Nancy Johnson’s brood appeared a typical 1960s middle-class family. Only decades later would a very different picture emerge.
Edwin and Nancy were an odd couple. They met after he’d left the Air Force, in the mid-fifties. Their first encounter took place in Ohio, where she worked as a telephone operator. They struck up a conversation, and Edwin told her he’d just returned to the United States after being stationed in Japan. “He talked about how he’d met a missionary who changed his life,” says Nancy, a stern woman with hornrimmed glasses and a bouffant hairdo. “Edwin talked a lot about God. He talked about morals and ethics.”
A powerfully built man who’d been a mechanic in the service, Edwin bore the scars of a traumatic beginning; reared in Connecticut, he’d lost a brother to drowning. For a year and a half, Edwin’s father blamed himself for leaving his son’s stroller unattended. Finally, when Edwin was seven, his father shot himself. “When we’d go out east, he’d take us to the river where it happened,” says Cole, the oldest of the Johnson siblings. “He had a morbid fascination about it.”
The Johnsons followed the sunshine and settled in Camarillo, California, a small town straddling the 101 freeway in a valley between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. In the sixties, Camarillo offered a peaceful life, the epitome of middle-class America. At the time, the population hovered just under 20,000. If children walking home from school were caught in the rain, local police offered rides. In the summer, families drove to the nearby beaches. School sports filled the weekends, and at the local beauty parlor and post office, gossip swirled like up-dos on prom night.
Using his Air Force nickname, Edwin opened Johnny Johnson’s Vehicles of Wolfsburg, a Volkswagen repair shop, at a time when VW Beetles and buses swarmed the hip West Coast. He became a prominent businessman and joined the local Chamber of Commerce, while he and Nancy made plans to begin a family.
Six years into their marriage, after three miscarriages, however, the Johnsons were childless. “We decided it wasn’t going to happen, so I put out the word that we were interested in adopting,” says Nancy. In an era before legalized abortion and the pill, women needed homes for infants they couldn’t keep. “I could have had as many children as I wanted,” she says. The Johnsons adopted four babies in