She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [79]
Three to four times a day they heard her talk to Tracey on her cell phone. Once she told the girls, “You’re in trouble,” then put Tracey on the telephone. Celeste had said they were disrespectful, and Tracey ordered them to “mind your mother.” Another time she called her hairdresser friend, Denise, laughing about how she’d drugged Steve. “He was driving me crazy,” she said. “He drove like an old man.”
While Christopher drove, Celeste sat beside him, talking. “I don’t expect Steve to live much longer, not with his age, weight, and health problems,” she said. “Then the money will be mine. I can travel, buy whatever I want.”
When they picked Steve up in Phoenix, Celeste was all smiles and asking how he was. He felt better, he said, and they loaded his suitcases into the Suburban and took off. Back in Austin, Celeste went to see Tracey at BookPeople. That night they slept together, and Tracey told Celeste about what had happened while she was gone. Drinking home alone, she’d grown depressed. She called her psychiatrist, who called in a suicide attempt on 911. By the time EMS arrived, her breathing was shallow. They released her the following day, after a night at the hospital. Tracey denied she’d tried to take her life, saying it was just a bad mix of her meds with alcohol. With her trip to Australia for the girls’ graduation looming in just two days, the next day at her appointment with her therapist, Celeste was upset.
“I hope Tracey doesn’t kill herself and interrupt my trip,” she complained.
Earlier that summer Celeste had asked Tracey to order a book through BookPeople: The Poisoner’s Handbook. It arrived while she was on the trip west, and when Tracey gave it to her, Celeste handed it back. Inside was a recipe for botulism, a dangerous nerve toxin produced by a bacterium found in soil, Clostridium botulinum. “I want you to make it for me while I’m gone,” Celeste told her. “I’m going to feed it to Steve.”
Tracey protested, refusing, but Celeste argued that she didn’t expect her to feed it to him, just to grow the botulism while she was in Australia. “You’re not going to even be there,” she said. First Tracey had agreed to spike Steve’s vodka; now it seemed a small step to grow a dangerous poison.
On August 4 the twins and Celeste left on their seventeen-day trip to Australia. Steve gave Celeste another wad of cash, and, just as she had on the trip west, she quickly spent it all, this time on a bagful of opals. From that point on she had no money for food or side trips, and the girls subsisted on the meals included in the tour package, sometimes only one a day. “It didn’t matter to Celeste. She hardly left the room,” says Jennifer. “She was talking to Tracey all the time on her cell phone.”
What they were talking about, Tracey would later say, was the botulism. Tracey made it in an airtight jar, mixing corn, raw hamburger, and dirt. She then flooded the jar with water, sealed it, and left it in the Texas sun to bake. Just before Celeste returned home, Tracey put it to the test by feeding the putrid mix to three mice she bought at a pet store. That day Celeste called nearly nonstop.
“Are they dead yet?” she asked.
“No,” Tracey answered. “It’s not working.”
When Celeste returned she took the jar home anyway, telling Tracey later that she fed the contents to Steve mixed into chili dogs. “The fat fuck didn’t even notice. Didn’t even upset his stomach,” she said, laughing and looking miffed at the same time. Celeste brushed the botulism’s failure off as a joke, yet Tracey understood Celeste’s message when she said, “I can’t