She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [35]
That same month, Kristina saw her mother do something odd. Steve, who fashioned himself a gourmet cook, made dinner, but she and Celeste set the table and served. That night, Celeste ground up pills in a bowl, then mixed the powder into Steve’s food.
“What’s that?” Kristina asked.
“Sleeping pills. I can’t stand being here all night with that fat fuck,” she said. “This way, he’ll have a couple of drinks and pass out. Then I can go out.”
When she put the food on the table, Celeste beamed at Steve, from every appearance the dedicated wife. Kristina would later say that she was so used to her mother doing odd things, she thought little of it, never thinking the pills could be dangerous.
About that same time, little more than a month after the wedding, Ray heard rumors around the television station. A friend had seen Celeste out on Sixth Street, partying at night. “I figured it was true,” says Ray. “But it wasn’t my business. I never told Steve.”
Celeste had made it amply clear to Kristina that money was the reason she was with Steve, and she lived the part. As his wife, she had a wallet full of credit cards and spent with abandon. She had a beautiful home, and he bought her jewelry and presents. Yet, it must have troubled her that she had little she could truly call her own. That summer, Steve was furious when she overdrew the checking account, and an incident from her past loomed—Celeste still owed the $20,000 in Arizona.
In June, Steve went to his safe deposit box at the Bank of America, where he’d banked since the eighties. When he opened the box, he called out for an officer. In moments he was complaining to a teller and the branch manager that his valuables had been stolen. When they couldn’t explain it, Steve called Chuck Fuqua, who’d handled his affairs with the bank since he arrived in Austin. “Someone’s stolen Elise’s jewelry out of my box,” Steve told him. “It’s all gone.”
“We’ll look into it,” Fuqua told him. The bank ran a records check, and later that same day Fuqua, who’d been at the wedding, reluctantly called Steve. It was a duty he dreaded. “Celeste’s been in your box,” he said. “She’s been in twice, once on May third and again on the twenty-second. She signed the register. No one else has been in there.”
The phone was silent. Then Steve said only, “Thank you.”
That day, he ordered Celeste to leave his house, and within a week he’d hired a divorce attorney. He brought the prenuptial agreement and the postnup that reaffirmed it to the first meeting. Celeste was frantic. If Steve divorced her then, she’d have nothing more than her personal possessions, no share of his fortune, no alimony. The message must have come through loud and clear when he brought in a locksmith and changed all the locks on the Austin house and the lake house.
When Anita encountered her at a shop, Celeste looked awful, tired, with large circles under her eyes, as if she’d been crying through sleepless nights.
“What’s wrong?” Anita asked.
“Steve and I are getting a divorce.”
“You’ve only just married,” Anita said, shocked.
On June 18, Celeste wrote a letter to Steve saying: “I don’t know where to begin. 99% of our problems are my fault.” She then bemoaned the horrors of her past, saying that even if she explained it, he couldn’t envision all she’d endured. Perhaps by then Steve knew about Harald, for she wrote that his leaving had devastated her. Or perhaps it was something else she said in the letter, something that must have been true—that she’d told so many people so many different stories she couldn’t keep them all straight. “I don’t remember how much I have told you,” she wrote.
In the letter, Celeste said she’d fallen in with bad friends: “What I didn’t tell you is that I was fined $20,000 in order to remain in Texas so I could fight for the girls.” When it came to the overdrawn checking account, she wrote: “When you told me I didn’t believe you … I really didn’t realize I had spent so much money. So I went to the safety deposit box and