She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [31]
Jeff couldn’t hear Steve, but when Craig hung up he said, “He won’t believe me. No one believes Celeste’s as ruthless as she is until it’s too late.”
Death must have been on Steve’s mind a lot that year. In February he’d been in for a checkup with Dr. George Handley, an avuncular man who’d been his personal physician and friend for many years. At five-ten and 312 pounds, Steve suffered from high blood pressure, asthma, and sleep apnea that forced him to use an oxygen machine while sleeping. Even worse, on a chest X ray, Dr. Handley discovered that Steve’s heart was enlarged, a sign of heart disease. Rich foods, drinking, and a lack of exercise had taken their toll. As spry as he may have seemed, as young at heart as his friends found Steve, he was aging quickly and not well.
That spring, Celeste put Steve on a diet. He walked and paid attention to his health. In no time he’d dropped fifty pounds and looked better than he had in years. He went to see Dr. Handley and told him that he needed help with his sexual prowess, now that he was with a younger woman. Handley suggested monthly testosterone injections. Steve laughed and agreed, jokingly dubbing the shots his “Vitamin T.”
At KBVO, Ray McEachern wondered if he’d been wrong about Celeste. From the first day they’d met, he hadn’t liked her, sizing her up as an opportunist out to cash in on a lonely, rich old man. “But I couldn’t deny that Steve looked happy,” he says. “He told me older women had bankrolls of their own and didn’t appreciate what he had to offer. But he could spoil Celeste, and she enjoyed what he could give her. He could bring stability to her life, and for the first time since Elise’s death, he wasn’t lonely.”
Yet Craig had been right. There was much Steve didn’t know about Celeste. As she had with Jimmy, she’d reinvented her past, spinning a web of lies. She failed to tell Steve about her second marriage, to Harald Wolf, only admitting to having been married twice, to Craig and Jimmy. “It was hard to know what to say,” says Kristina. “She told one person one thing and another something else. I just kept quiet.”
Although she was technically the housekeeper, Celeste knew little about how to care for a home. At one point she went to the store to buy new sheets. She bought four-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets that came out of the dryer in a ball of wrinkles. Since Celeste didn’t iron, the sheets went with all the clothes, even the underwear, to the dry cleaner.
Yet, Celeste knew what was important to Steve. He was a careful man, one who’d spent a lifetime keeping his world in order. He’d retained habits he learned in the navy, where he had little room aboard the ship, and kept his possessions neatly folded and stored. She didn’t wash his shirts, but made sure they were organized, neatly stacked, and arranged by color in his closet. Celeste smoked, but only outside, often commenting that she was being careful of Steve’s house, making sure the smoke from her Marlboro Light 100s didn’t ruin the paint.
Yet her talents as a housekeeper undoubtedly meant little to Steve, who wanted a companion and lover, not someone to wash his floors. He wasn’t accustomed to a woman he could rule. Elise had always spoken her mind, and Celeste did the same, giving him back everything he shot at her. Steve liked that. He’d never wanted an anemic woman who danced around issues. He told friends he liked Celeste’s spunk.
From her first days there, Celeste slept in Steve’s bedroom and moved Kristina into an extra bedroom, enrolling her in Hill Country Middle School, where the students came from affluent families. “Kristina wasn’t like a lot of the kids,” says another student. “She wasn’t spoiled. She hadn’t grown up with money.”
Perhaps remembering her own girlhood when she was considered odd, Celeste appeared determined to see that her daughter fit in. To that end, she threw a slumber party, inviting thirty girls from the soccer team. Celeste made up the guest list and reigned over the