04.Die.My.Love.2007 (7 page)

In the evenings, Fred threw a ball around with Paxton in the front yard and then cooked them all dinner. He built a playground with swings for the kids, and Piper quickly fi lled the house and yard with her menagerie of animals, including dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and ferrets she walked on a leash.

She took in wounded animals and nursed them back to health, even building a small pond in the backyard that she populated with fish and fist- sized bullfrogs she’d found at a nearby creek. In no time, Piper’s bullfrogs, to the dismay of the neighbors, had spread out and taken over the street.

On weekends, Piper and Fred worked in the yard together.

She planted azaleas, and Fred constructed a deck off the DIE, MY LOVE / 47

kitchen and a lattice gazebo. One year, for Mother’s Day, Fred built Piper a raised bed where they grew vegetables, including peppers she cooked with tomatoes and turned into homemade salsa. Piper was proud of her talents in the garden, and when one neighbor remarked that she’d planted a wisteria two years earlier and it had yet to bloom, Piper boasted that she’d put hers in the ground just that summer, and it was covered with blossoms. “She was always doing the oneupsmanship thing,” says the neighbor. “You could never do anything as well as Piper, not to her mind.”

Yet, at the same time Piper was kneading bread every morning, the real work of the household—as in Texas—was done by a parade of nannies who came and went, many last-ing only days before they quit or Piper fired them. Most were in the U.S. illegally and spoke little English, and along with watching over the children they were charged with caring for the house.

“It seemed like the only criteria Piper had for hiring them was that they had a pulse,” says Melody Foster, an ample, warm-hearted woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair and a ready laugh, who with her husband, Pete, lived directly behind the Jablins. As they had with the Kuentzes, Fred and Piper became friendly with the Fosters, who had a daughter, Chelsea, Paxton’s age; so much so that Fred cut a gate through the back fence so they could circulate freely between yards. Along with both having young children to care for, Melody and Piper had something else in common: They were both attorneys.

A year after moving to Richmond, Piper became pregnant again. This time it was an ectopic pregnancy, and she again lost the baby. Afterward she returned to her very dark place. “It’s like everything goes gray,” she says, explaining what her postpartum depression felt like. “Everything feels dull.”

On weekends, Mel and Piper sometimes opened a bottle 48 / Kathryn Casey

of wine and sat together and talked while they watched the children play. At such times, Piper often brought up her family in Texas and how much she missed them. Each summer, she took the children to visit, and when she returned she seemed melancholy, yearning for her family and talking often and long about all the Rountrees, especially her closest sister, Tina. Piper wanted to be with them, Mel understood, but it seemed almost unnaturally so.

Family was important to Fred, too. At work, many were noticing slight changes in him the year after he arrived at UR, when both his parents died within a six- week period.

Stunned with so much loss in such a short period of time, he became introspective. He spoke with Joanne Ciulla about life and death, and the loss of a loved one. “He seemed to be grappling with some very deep feelings,” she says. “He loved his parents very much, and he was hurting.”

It would seem that he got little comfort at home. Piper didn’t go to either of the funerals. It had been years since she’d attended family occasions at their house. After they’d fallen ill, Fred had driven to stay with them over weekends, to help. Piper never went along. Still, when his $130,000

share of their estate arrived, Fred invested it in something he and Piper both wanted, a beach house they dubbed “The Outer Banks,” four hours away in Corolla, North Carolina.

It wasn’t fancy, and over the years he’d spend weekends and vacations rebuilding the small house, but it was a place to escape to.

That December, Piper gave birth for a third time. She and Fred named the baby Callyn Rountree-Jablin and called her Callie. Afterward, Piper again sank into an even deeper depression. When it passed, this time motherhood didn’t come as naturally for Piper.

Callie, a golden child with blond curls and crystal blue eyes, was a different kind of child than Jocelyn and Paxton.

Joce was a happy yet easy young girl, by then six years old, DIE, MY LOVE / 49

and she demanded little. Three-year-old Paxton loved sports and was all boy, yet never seemed to push his mother for what he wanted. On the other hand, neighbors would describe Callie as an impish child, one with a mischievous glint in her eyes. While the two older children, even from young ages, tended to take care of themselves, Callie, by her very nature, demanded attention. “She was the type of kid who needed her mom more,” says Mel. “And Piper didn’t appear to have more to give her.”

By the time Callie had turned three, Piper was escaping to the Fosters’ house, “just to get away for a little while.”

Mel would look outside and see Callie in the yard, by herself. When she voiced concern, Piper assured her, “Oh, I do it all the time. She’s all right.”

For a long time it seemed odd to Melody that a woman like Piper, who appeared to base her entire self-image on being an exceptional mother, could be so careless with her children. At times Piper appeared the ideal mother. She became interested in geology and spent hours with the three children at the creek, picking up rocks and identifying them.

She painted castles and Walt Disney princesses on the walls of the girls’ bedrooms, covered the walls of the downstairs bathroom with a mural of trees, and painted the doghouse to look as if it were built of red brick. When she volunteered as a guest reader in one of the children’s classes, she arrived dressed as Alice in Wonderland, that day’s book. At other times, however, when Piper was in one of her funks, she locked the children out of the house and simply went to bed.

From week to week nannies came and went at the Jablin house hold, some quitting, others fired. When she was between help, Piper became anxious, asking Mel or, on days Mel worked, Mel’s nanny to babysit. Often Piper seemed to be searching for a way to absolve herself of the responsibilities of the children, like at bunco one night. While Piper played the popular dice game with the other neighborhood 50 / Kathryn Casey

women, she proposed starting a babysitting co-op. Some of the women agreed it sounded like a good idea, but no plans were made. Still, the following morning Piper showed up with Callie in tow, trying to drop her off at the home of one of the women. Piper gained a reputation in the neighborhood, and some of the women began checking their doors when the doorbell rang. If she stood outside, they wouldn’t answer. “She was constantly trying to find others to care for her kids,” says Mel. “She loved playing with her children, teaching them art, whatever her project of the week was. But she just didn’t want to take care of them.”

Yet at first the two women got along well. Mel found Piper creative and fun, if eccentric. Kingsley was a friendly place, the kind that fosters neighborhood parties, bonfi res, and barbecues. At one Halloween party, Fred wore his favorite wizard costume and Piper came attired in a full fenc-ing outfit, with a sword. More often than not Piper had a glass of wine in her hand. She never made a secret of her drinking. When Mel’s father came to visit, Piper walked in the Fosters’ back door unannounced, as she often did, and introduced herself to the elderly gentleman as, “Piper, the neighborhood drunk.”

In the summers, most of Piper’s time was spent on the tennis courts. The family joined Canterbury, a neighborhood tennis and swim club, for a cost of $300 a year. One summer Piper caused a stir at the club swimming pool. She still ran every morning and had the trim figure of a teenager, but members complained that they didn’t want a parent wearing a thong bathing suit in front of their children.

A while later, without consulting Fred, Piper also joined Raintree, where the dues were $135 a month. Unlike Canterbury, Raintree had day care, and Piper dropped the children off and left them there much of the day, far beyond the club rule of a three-hour maximum. At such times, although par-DIE, MY LOVE / 51

ents were supposed to be on the club grounds, Piper was nowhere to be found. It was then that the rumors began: that Piper was having affairs with the young men she played tennis with at the clubs. Melody heard the talk, but never said anything to Fred. “It wasn’t the type of thing you told a spouse,” she says. “It was gossip.”

Through it all, the Jablins’ marriage remained troubled.

In 1996, the year after Callie was born, they were again in marriage counseling. Piper was unhappy, feeling unappreciated and ignored. She expected more from Fred, more attention to her and the children. And there was the thing about the money. During the sessions, Piper complained that Fred kept her on a tight financial leash, and said she wanted to be the one to control the family funds. Fred agreed. From that point on he set aside $800 a month to cover large expenses, like insurance, and gave the balance of the money to Piper to pay the bills. “Fred wanted her to have a sphere of infl uence,” remembers John Daly. “She needed something to be in charge of.”

When Daly saw Fred at conferences after the move to UR, Fred seemed satisfied with his decision to leave UT, yet there was a sadness about him. Fred told his old friend that he worried about Piper. She wasn’t content in Virginia, he said, despite not having to work and being free to spend time with the children. “Piper could never seem to be happy,”

says Daly. “That made Fred feel bad, that no matter what he did for her, it wasn’t enough. He believed she was troubled, but he loved her. So he had no choice but to keep trying.”

Early during her time in Richmond, Piper connected with a kindred soul, Loni Elwell, another well- educated, West End, stay-at-home mom. Loni, married to a corporate executive, had a master’s degree in social work. She’d landed in Richmond much as Piper did, because her husband’s job brought her there. Their daughters were on the same soccer team, and 52 / Kathryn Casey

both their husbands worked long hours. “We met at a soccer game and became fast friends,” recalls Loni, an athletic woman with short blond hair and a wide smile. “We’d hook up in the morning and spend all day together. We were pretty much inseparable from the start. Everyone walks and talks the same in the West End, drives the same kind of cars. Piper and I were different. True and honest.”

“They considered themselves non-Stepford wives,” says someone who knew them both. “They kind of laughed about the other women on the West End.”

By then, Melody Foster had become a stay-at-home mom, and she was growing weary of Piper’s drop-ins, simply

walking unannounced in her unlocked back door. Once, when the school nurse called and Melody’s youngest daughter, Claire, was sick, Piper, who was in Mel’s kitchen drinking coffee and rambling on, said, “Oh, just don’t go get her.

That’s what I do.”

It bothered Mel, too, that Piper took things to the extreme.

The year the Fosters cut down a few trees in their backyard to make room for a playground for their children, Piper protested by sitting on one of the fallen tree trunks. And then there were the constant complaints. Piper didn’t like a dusk-to-dawn light the Fosters installed in their backyard, claiming it made a buzzing that kept her awake at night.

Eventually, Melody Foster concluded that despite Piper’s demonstrative love for her children and her view of herself as the ideal mother, Piper didn’t seem to understand her children’s needs except through the distorted glass of her own wants. “Piper would get wound up and go on binges, like rollerblading,” she says. “She expected the kids to rollerblade with her constantly, every day, whether they wanted to or not, until her obsession with it passed. She loved tennis, so they were expected to love tennis. A lot of what Piper did just seemed exaggerated and strange.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 53

After a while Melody began locking her doors and pulling her car into the garage, to make it appear she wasn’t home, in order to avoid Piper planting herself in the kitchen, wanting to talk and not taking the hints when Melody was ready for her to leave.

In contrast, Loni Elwell had no such qualms. She and Piper walked unannounced into each other’s homes. “Peeps, where are you?” Loni would call out. Then they’d spend the day together, playing tennis or doing things with their children, and often cooked dinner at one or the other’s house at night. “My husband was gone a lot and Fred was always working,” says Loni. “It was the way our lives were then.

We took care of the children and our husbands worked.”

Later, Loni would describe Piper as misunderstood, a kind soul who many simply didn’t appreciate. “Piper lived in the moment,” she’d say. “She was the one who taught me to wear my good clothes and drink my wine out of my best crystal, not saving it for a day that might never come.”

Yet, Loni experienced Piper’s gray side, the depression that seemed to haunt her life. At times, she’d arrive and fi nd Piper in bed in the middle of the day, with all the blinds pulled. “Peeps, what are you doing?” she’d prod.

Piper would just want to be left alone.

Over the years, Loni thought she could see the break-down in the Jablins’ marriage. But while others talked of Piper’s histrionics and her unreliability, Loni blamed Fred.

He worked long hours and was rarely home. When he was, he spent the time in his home office. Mel saw that, too, a man devoted to his work, who knew his wife was troubled and propped her up by hiring nannies and cleaning ladies, by sending Callie, the youngest, to day care, where he knew she’d be cared for, because he didn’t trust Piper to watch over her. It must have been disappointing for Fred. He’d left UT to give Piper the opportunity to stay home with the 54 / Kathryn Casey

children, but over the years in Richmond, it became apparent that she didn’t manage the family any better than she had her career.