She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [38]
At the lake, Celeste made friends with Dawn, the wife of Jim Madigan, the builder Steve hired to put up the house. A petite woman with thick dark amber hair, she lived in a house her husband had built nearby. Another friend was an elderly, stocky woman named Marilou Gibbs, the mother of the realtor who’d sold Steve the lot. From the beginning, Kristina thought little of her mother’s friends. “Celeste was always buying them things,” she says.
One friend would later say that Celeste turned shopping into an Olympic sport, spending up to $50,000 in a single day. When the stores were closed and she couldn’t sleep, she took Kristina to a Super Wal-Mart that was open twenty-four hours, where she bought albums and books. Celeste loved to read mysteries and true crime books, working through the plots and figuring out what the bad guys did that got them caught.
At night, Celeste continued to sprinkle Steve’s food with ground-up sleeping pills, but it was while they were living at the lake house that Kristina noticed her mother do something else: pour half a bottle of Steve’s Wolfschmidt vodka down the drain and refill it with Everclear—pure grain alcohol. “This will help him pass out early,” Celeste said, laughing. “Then I can do what I want to do for the rest of the night.”
From that day on, Steve would sip his ritual cocktails, never knowing that rather than 80 proof vodka he was drinking half 190 proof Everclear. While Celeste filled his glass with alcohol, Kristina noticed she filled her own with water. Yet the teenager said nothing, afraid of her mother’s volcanic wrath. “I just never crossed her,” she says.
Kristina maintained her silence even after she overheard Celeste laughing and bragging to a friend about the Everclear cocktails. “I’ve got a name for them,” she said with a giggle. “‘The Graveyard.’”
Chapter
5
Ayear into their marriage, Steve’s finances were becoming ever more enmeshed with Celeste, much of it by his own hand. In early 1996 he brought in Brian Rahlfs, a vice president and portfolio manager with Bank of America, Dallas, to meet with them about investing his fortune. Over lunch at the country club, where Celeste ordered her usual chicken-fried steak and Coke in a can, they discussed his plans for the eventual disbursement of his money, the Steven F. Beard Jr. Trust. Without counting the lake house, his IRAs, and personal property, Steve’s fortune totaled more than $10 million. That same month, Steve had his lawyer, David Kuperman, draw up a new marital agreement. In the event of his death, Steve wanted to leave Celeste not only the $1 million, but half of both the lake house and a lot he purchased at 3900 Toro Canyon Road in Austin.
In the more than a decade since Steve and Elise moved into the house in Westlake Hills, Austin had grown westward. Million-dollar estates proliferated; so much so that by the time he married Celeste, the Terrace Mountain Drive house had been surpassed by neighborhoods of stately homes in Georgian, English Tudor, and modern design.
After selling the house in 1995, Steve purchased the prime undeveloped acre lot little more than a mile from Terrace Mountain Drive, in an exclusive, gated enclave called the Gardens of Westlake. The slice of land was just down the street from thick metal gates that guarded the mega-million-dollar estate of Michael Dell. In Austin, Dell was royalty. As the founder of the highly successful Dell Computer Corporation, he was the poster boy for the city’s burgeoning hightech industry.
One day the phone rang in the office of Gus Voelzel, who specialized in high-end residential and commercial construction. “I hear you’re a great architect,” Steve said.
“Some people say I am,” Voelzel replied. “Who told you?”
“My builder. He tells me that I need to get you to design my new house.”
Two days later Gus pulled up in front of the Toro Canyon lot and Steve was already there, standing outside his Cadillac with his dog, Meagan. When Gus got out of his car, the lab growled and bared her teeth. “Now you stop that, girl,” Steve said, walking forward.