She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [45]
From that point on Steve was worth considerably more to Celeste dead than alive and divorced.
Chapter
6
Throughout 1997 and into 1998, life at the Toro Canyon house resembled an advertisement for living the American dream. The whole family traveled to St. Thomas for Christmas. One summer, the girls studied biology in Hawaii for two weeks. At home, Celeste played on the country club bunco league—evenings she called “drunko bunco”—took golf lessons, and had her hair styled twice a week and nails manicured. And she doted on Steve, throwing him elaborate parties, once reserving an entire restaurant for his friends. He showered her with jewelry, and she gave him a bronze fountain of a young girl reading a book for the front yard. To those who didn’t know what lurked beneath, Steve and Celeste, the twins, and their menagerie of pets—cats Priscilla and Ollie and dogs Meagan and Nikki—seemed picture perfect. And when Celeste wasn’t wrestling with yet another crisis, Steve did appear happy. Ray called one day, and Steve answered the phone.
“What are you doing?” Ray asked.
“Playing Mr. Mom. I’m getting ready to take the girls to soccer practice.”
“Boy, things have sure changed.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “But not in a bad way.”
“Steve was crazy about the girls,” remembers Anita. “And when Celeste wasn’t doing something awful, he was crazy about her, too.”
Even when she was furious, yelling and screaming, Steve dismissed her tantrums. “She doesn’t mean it,” he told Kristina. “Your mother’s a firecracker, and sometimes she blows up. Don’t pay attention. She’ll get over it.”
“I don’t know why he loved her, but he did,” says Kristina.
To visitors walking in the front door, the Toro Canyon house, too, looked perfect. If the maid jarred a knickknack, Celeste rushed to reposition it. It was as if the house had to testify to her perfection, no blemish ignored. Yet, out of the sight of guests and Steve, it was very different. Like their marriage: faultless on the surface and troubled beneath.
Celeste barred Steve from the girls’ wing—Kristina’s bedroom and the guest room, now Jennifer’s territory— telling him it was improper for a man to go into young girls’ quarters, even his daughters.’ There, in the attic crawl space and closets, Celeste hid what she didn’t want him to see, including credit card bills that poured into her four P.O. boxes. She was so bent on keeping them secret that one afternoon when Steve was out and she fell and broke her arm climbing down from the attic, she staged a second fall in the living room in front of him, to explain the injury.
When sleeping, Steve wore an oxygen mask for his sleep apnea, one that hummed and thumped throughout the night. Sometimes Celeste slept with him. Other nights she complained that the machine kept her awake, and she bunked in a spare bed in Kristina’s room. Until late in the night, Celeste sat at the computer, typing, searching the Internet. “It got so I had to be able to sleep with the light on and typing in the background,” says Kristina. “Sometimes she stayed awake all night.”
When she did sleep, Celeste had some odd habits. Not liking her toes to touch, she packed tissue between them. She felt the same way about her enhanced breasts, and wore a bra to bed to keep them from pressing against her chest. “No matter how late she was up, she put the tissue between her toes,” says Kristina. “She was obsessive about it.”
As perfect as she kept the front of the house and the master bedroom, she threw the twins’ wing into chaos. Celeste kept extra clothes in their closets, often throwing them on the floor so she could change after Steve fell asleep and go to the bars or shopping. She had a voracious appetite for reading, especially crime books, finishing three or four a week. Her books were scattered everywhere.
Many things seemed to occupy her thoughts that year. As she had been since childhood, she was fascinated with finding her biological mother. She hired a private investigator, tracked the woman down, and Celeste and Steve left