She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [82]
Once she’d screwed the cap on, Celeste placed it in a cabinet in the garage, where the Texas heat would bake it. It wasn’t to be disturbed. But again the plan failed. Days later Justin noticed the jar with something that looked like liquid fertilizer brewing in it. He picked it up, unscrewed the top to look at it, and moved it, disturbing the growth of the botulism. When Celeste realized what had happened, she was despondent.
“Steve has to die,” she told Tracey. “He just has to.”
Within days she had another plan, asking Tracey to buy her ten tablets of ecstasy. “I’ll take him to a bar and slip it in his drink. They’ll think someone else did it,” she said.
As before, Tracey did as Celeste asked, reasoning she was not the one who’d be putting it into his drink. Days later Celeste claimed to have used the drugs, again without success. “That fat old fuck. He’s so big nothing can kill him,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “It’s like trying to kill an elephant.”
“Mom won’t get out of bed,” Kristina told Tracey on the phone the next day.
Tracey rushed over. As before, Steve was gone and Kristina was frantic, worried about Celeste. Tracey urged Celeste out of bed and convinced her to dress. “Living with Steve is killing me,” she said.
That day, Tracey told Kristina something she’d wanted to tell her for a long time. “Your mother and I are a couple,” she said. “She’s just not ready to tell you yet.”
“Okay,” Kristina said, not knowing what to think, except that in her heart she’d known it all along.
It seemed that Tracey was tired of hiding the relationship and was ready to tell the world. “I love Celeste,” she told Terry Meyer, the manicurist, the next time she was at Tramps having her nails done.
“Everyone does. She’s great,” Terry said.
“No, I really love Celeste,” Tracey emphasized. “And if that old man ever hurts her, I’ll kill him.” Terry was shocked, not knowing what to say. When Celeste came in, Terry told her what Tracey had said.
“Did she really say that?” Celeste said.
“She did.”
At home, Celeste watched Court TV and homicide investigations on the A&E channel. One program on how murderers were caught seemed to fascinate her. On Celeste’s desk Jennifer found a packet of grisly photos of dead bodies, mostly with gunshot wounds.
“Why’s she have these?” she asked Kristina.
“I don’t know,” her sister replied.
Steve had been bored that August, while Celeste and the girls were in Australia. With Davenport II nearing completion, he had no pet projects in the works. Again he turned his attention to the house. Now that he had some time on his hands, he called Gus Voelzel and asked him to design maid’s quarters and a guest house, one his grown kids could stay in when they visited. It had been years since any of Steve and Elise’s children had come. Most kept a distance from Celeste, who’d called them more than once, raging, usually about nothing of importance. “I’ll tell your father about this,” she stormed, as if talking to small children.
By mid-September, Celeste was frantic. At Tracey’s house three to four nights a week, she paced. Each time, they spent the evening drinking and talking about Steve. As Tracey saw it, Celeste was becoming increasingly unstable. “I’m giving him more sleeping pills and Everclear,” she said. “Eventually, it’s gotta kill him.”
On September 10, Stacy, the travel agent, ran into Celeste and Steve at a restaurant, having lunch. Steve introduced her to Celeste and they talked about the trip. “I really think you ought to take the insurance,” Stacy said again. “That’s a lot of money to risk.”
“I’m not going to cancel. Absolutely not,” Steve said firmly. “We don’t need insurance because we’re going on that trip.”
Many people noticed a change in Celeste that month. When she and Steve had dinner with Chuck Fuqua and his girlfriend, Celeste sat distracted at the table, not paying attention to the conversation, as