She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [47]
At times Bess and Bob Dennison wondered about the girls, who migrated to the house next door off and on during the week. Bess thought the girls seemed lonely, “like they wanted a little love.” They were charmed by the teenagers, especially their naiveté. When Bob talked to them about college, they seemed reluctant to attend a large university and terrified to leave Austin and live alone. “I’d be afraid to do that,” Kristina told him. “I’m not sure I could take care of myself.”
“She was really a timid young girl,” says Bess. “The girls looked like their mother, but they were like a shy reflection of her.”
What the Dennisons didn’t understand was that since they were toddlers, the girls had grown up afraid of their own mother. So much so that when Jennifer walked in one day to find Celeste grinding up sleeping pills and mixing them into Steve’s food, she never asked why. Another day, she saw her topping off his Wolfschmidt bottle with Everclear. “You’d better not say anything,” Celeste told her. “Keep your mouth shut.”
“I did because I didn’t think Steve would believe me. If I told him and he believed her, not me, she’d make my life miserable,” she says. “And I didn’t think it would really hurt him. I never thought it would give him more than a bad hangover.”
By 1998 the twins had a tight group of friends, including Justin Grimm, a tall, dark-haired, shy teenager, who met Kristina when they were yearbook photographers. Kristina and Justin were just friends, but Jennifer was dating a sandy-haired, jowly teenager with small blue eyes, Christopher Doose, whose family had oil money. The fifth member of their tight-knit group was Amy Cozart, a pudgy, wide-faced girl with vivid blond hair. “Amy, Justin, and Christopher were the first friends we brought home,” says Jennifer. “They liked us enough to put up with Celeste.”
As extensions of her daughters, Celeste treated all five teens as her servants, sending them to retrieve her mail from her secret P.O. boxes and ordering them to run errands. “You’re my little niglets,” she said, laughing. “Now go off and do as you’re told.”
Celeste always seemed too busy shopping or partying to run her own errands or fulfill her promises, even when her friend Dawn needed help raising money for her son’s Montessori school. For months Kristina sold tickets to a fund-raising dinner and convinced local merchants to donate items for the auction. “Then Celeste took the credit,” says Anita. “She acted like she’d done the work, never mentioning Kristina.”
When the teens weren’t off chasing about Austin as she directed, Celeste presided over them, flirting with Justin, teasing Christopher, and confiding all manner of things, including details about her sex life with Steve. When they were at the Beard house on Sundays, she made a show of getting ready for sex with Steve. “Time to make some money,” she’d say, ordering them to take the dogs out of the master wing, complaining, “It takes him too long if he gets distracted.”
Often when she was angry with him, Celeste raged, “That fat old man, I never thought he’d live this long.”
Afterward, in front of the others, Celeste bragged about her sexual prowess, giving the girls pointers on what she considered the essentials of life, including her insights into the finer points of oral sex. Embarrassed, the twins tried to deflect the conversation.
Still, Celeste could be great fun. Rarely did she allow a quiet moment, and for the teens her enthusiasm could be infectious. There were pizza raids, when Celeste placed phone orders for stacks of pizzas and had them delivered to an unsuspecting family, then sat in the car with the teens giggling when the delivery man walked dejectedly back to his car still carrying the full cardboard boxes.