04.Die.My.Love.2007 (3 page)

“Sure,” Fred said. “No problem.”

Something happened in that parking lot that day when 14 / Kathryn Casey

Fred Jablin met Piper Rountree. He was eight years older than she, and they’d grown up in very different worlds. Yet there was an immediate attraction.

“That was the beginning. From that point on, Fred and Piper were infatuated with each other,” says Daly. Refl ecting on how that single event changed his friend’s life, Daly paused before adding, “That will always be with me, that I was the one who introduced them and started it all.”

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They were such a strange match that many would question why Fred Jablin and Piper Rountree bonded so quickly and so tightly. Fred was precise and exacting, at times even unyielding, but a calm and measured presence.

He believed the world was fashioned out of black and white, with little room for shades of gray. Piper, on the other hand, was a free spirit, ethereal and gossamer, like a butterfl y fl itting from flower to flower. Volatile and with a quick temper, she was the quirky hippie, the young, exuberant, artistic earth mother who rescued stray animals. Fred was a plain man, whose clothes hung loose and rumpled on his slight frame, with little more interruption than they might on a hanger. With her classic features, Piper was truly beautiful in her tight jeans, boots, and peasant blouses. Together, they were the quintessential odd couple, the epitome of the old adage: opposites attract.

“We both loved to have fun, and we had fun together,”

Piper would say many years later, trying to explain the instant attraction. “In his own way, at least back then, Fred could be playful, like at Halloween. We both liked to dress up, to pretend to be something we weren’t for the night. We had that in common and other things. At first, well, at fi rst it was good.”

At first there were summer days spent at Lake Travis, including forays to Hippie Hollow, Austin’s clothing optional 16 / Kathryn Casey

beach, with its rocky shoreline. Stripped of all inhibitions, Fred playfully pounded his chest like Tarzan and jumped into the chilly water. They double-dated with Daly and his wife, Chris, eve nings spent over dinner or at the movies.

Soon, neighbors on Fred’s quiet street began seeing a comely young woman jogging in the mornings.

“Fred introduced us, and we liked Piper,” says Leo Kuentz, who, with his wife, Linda, and their children, lived next door to Fred. The Kuentzes and Fred had moved into the neighborhood just months apart and became fast friends.

Leo worked as a repairman for the local telephone company.

He and Fred were so close, they didn’t put a fence between their yards, and circulated back and forth.

Although very different, the two men had a lot in common. They were both into finely tuned stereo equipment with big

speakers—although Leo, a large, strongly built man, listened to rock and roll and Fred preferred jazz. They worked on projects around the houses together, and they talked. Leo enjoyed listening to Fred chatter about his work and his theories on life. Somehow, Fred always seemed able to boil everything down and explain it, often in terms of a prevailing theory of communication. “I’d take a customer relations class at work and tell Fred what they were teaching us,” Leo recalled years later, “and Fred would say,

‘You know, Leo, that’s based on so-and- so professor’s work.

That’s the theory of this or that.’ Fred loved what he did. He lived it.”

Linda and Piper didn’t hit it off quite as well. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along, but that they didn’t develop the closeness the Kuentzes had with Fred. “Piper was fun and pretty and full of energy,” says Linda, a petite woman with blond hair. “It was just that we never got really tight. What I remember about Piper is that she seemed closest to her family. She talked about the Rountrees all the time, especially Tina.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 17

Many would remember the Rountrees that way, an exceptionally close family, warm and inviting. “They were a real presence in Harlingen,” one family friend would remember.

“They seemed happy to be with each other, and people in town felt privileged to know them.”

Piper was the youngest of the five children of Betty Jane and Dr. William Coleman Rountree, Jr. Betty had studied to be a nurse, and Bill was an Air Force surgeon, a heart specialist, and the son of a doctor before him. He had earned his M.D. at Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans after World War II, and the children were born all over the world; the oldest, William III, in New Orleans in 1948, and Piper, the youngest, twelve years later, on January 6, 1960, in Japan. In between there were three other Rountree children: Tina, Jean, and Tom. When asked about her unusual name, Piper would claim that she’d been named after a bottle of France’s Piper- Heidsieck champagne.

The Rountree family went back at least three genera-tions in South Texas, and, according to Piper, her paternal grandfather married five times, once to a sister of the infa-mous outlaw Jesse James. Her paternal grandfather had constructed a family tree, and legend had it that he was a descendent of Moses Rountree, an orphan discovered in England during the 1300s under a rowan tree, a species believed to have mystical powers to ward off witches and evil spirits. Believers carved crosses and walking sticks from the wood to use as protection. Throughout the years, Piper talked of her heritage often, describing being a Rountree as “important.”

“Since we moved every year or two, we were all really close,” says Tina. “We came to rely on one another more than on anyone else. We were all best friends.”

Perhaps that closeness developed at least partly because of the family troubles. Years later Piper would describe their father, William, as an alcoholic. “I barely knew him,” she’d say.

18 / Kathryn Casey

“First he was drinking, and when he drank he could be mean.

Then, when I was still little, he was out of the picture.”

William Rountree retired from the military in the mid-sixties, while the family was stationed in Harlingen, Texas, and most of Piper’s growing-up years would be spent there.

Harlingen, a small city on the southern tip of Texas, thirty miles from the border, lies in what Texans call “the Valley,”

a meld of the U.S. and Mexico populated by ranch houses, palm trees, and miles of mobile homes and citrus groves.

The city, which boasted little more than 41,000 residents at the time Piper was growing up, has a rich history. It began in the mid-1800s as a frontier town called “Six- shooter Junc-tion,” after the Texas Rangers and border patrol offi cers stationed there. Irrigation canals off the Rio Grande River fed the crops and gave Harlingen its name, christened after Van Harlingen, in the Netherlands, another town located on a coastal plane and crossed by canals. The predominant race and culture of the area is Hispanic, and nearly a third of the city’s residents fall below the poverty level. “Harlingen’s always been a sleepy little city,” says one of Piper’s childhood friends. “Everyone’s goal was to graduate from high school, go to college, and move away.”

Looking back, it would seem that Piper’s childhood was plagued by trauma. In September 1967, when she was seven years old, her father took her to the beach at nearby Padre Island following Hurricane Beulah, a category four storm that ravaged the South Texas coastline with waves of tor-nadoes. While there, she stood under a damaged house on stilts. “The house fell on me,” she says. “The foundation gave way, and it just collapsed.” She suffered broken ribs and a ruptured spleen that had to be removed. Afterward, she was prone to illness, and she suffered nightmares, reliving the terror.

Then, when Piper was nine, her father suffered a stroke.

William Rountree was just forty-eight at the time. “He re-DIE, MY LOVE / 19

covered, but he continued to smoke and drink,” says Piper’s oldest sister, Tina. Afterward, Piper would say he was meaner than before, and her mother, Betty, would say that her husband had a “personality change” that forced him to be moved to a mobile home the family owned near the beach. Many of Piper’s friends would grow up believing that Piper’s mother was divorced from her husband, since Piper’s father was absent for much of her school years.

After her husband’s stroke, Betty took up real estate. She grew a good business, and Piper’s childhood friends would remember her as a solid presence. “Betty was a cool mom, the kind we all wanted,” says one of them. “She was strict, but she talked to us, not down to us. She went to PTA meetings and did all the stuff. She was always there for her kids.”

“Piper was the baby of the family, and my mom was really protective,” says Tina. Piper’s friends remember Betty fawning over Piper as a little girl, showering her with attention. That wasn’t hard. Piper was a bright, attractive child.

With thick dark hair, a compact little body, and a delicate face, she was artistic, a talent she’d later claim she inherited from a grandfather, who was a structural engineer. Betty would later say the one time Piper got in trouble was when she and her friend Lisa found the family wine cabinet and drank until they both became ill. With a physician father and a realtor for a mother, Piper enjoyed a certain status in Harlingen. “The Rountrees weren’t rich, but they were socially up there,” says one of Piper’s friends. “They were clan-nish, kind of a tight-knit family, but they were well thought of.”

Despite what she’d call a “good childhood,” Piper would describe her relationship with her mother very differently.

Years later she’d tell a psychiatrist that Betty was absent much of the time: “It was really Tina who raised me. Tina was always more of a mother to me than my mother.”

Although eight years separated the two girls, they were 20 / Kathryn Casey

extremely close. Piper’s friends would remember that when they were in high school, Tina, who’d already graduated from college, went out with them at night to a park where the teenagers smoked, drank, and talked. “They were closer than any sisters I’ve ever known,” says one of Piper’s friends.

“It was obvious that Tina was there for Piper, and Piper was there for Tina. Everyone understood that.”

“I admired the way Piper was so pop ular in high school.

I never was,” Tina said, her blue eyes flashing. “The thing is that Piper and I are closer than ordinary sisters. We’re soul sisters. We’re incomplete without each other. As children, my mother made me sleep in bed with Piper. Even as adults, we frequently slept together. We were so close, it just felt right. I love her so much, it was like we were part of each other.”

In school, Piper was “on the A-list,” says one classmate.

“She ran with the rich crowd, and she was one of
those
girls, the ones who seemed to have everything going for them.”

Some would call her quirky. She dressed in striped knee socks, layers of mismatched clothes, and big chunky shoes before they were in style. She was a top student. In 1978, the year she graduated, the Harlingen High School yearbook, called
El Arroyo
, translation “The Stream,” listed Piper’s many accomplishments: National Honor Society, student council, speech, drama, tennis team, editor of the school’s literary publication, homecoming court, choir, yearbook com-mittee, and third place at the science fair. Many would remember Piper as a bookworm, a student who devoured the school library, reading Aristotle and Milton.

“Anything she ever did at school, she succeeded in,” says a friend.

With friends, Piper was giving, a motherly young girl who helped others, volunteering at the hospital, pitching in to tutor her friends who struggled with their classes. And before it became fashionable, Piper was dedicated to the DIE, MY LOVE / 21

environment. From an early age, she worried about the effects of the ozone layer and the plight of animals. She was so gentle and so involved with nature “she’d pick up a spider and carry it out of the house instead of killing it,” says an old friend.

Despite her accomplishments, boys never seemed intimi-dated by Piper. “She’d start talking to them, and she was so different, so unusual, they’d become fascinated,” says a friend. “She seemed to really clue in to guys, and it seemed like, if she’d asked, they would have given her anything she wanted.”

Later, after everything happened, two incidents from Piper’s high school years would resonate for her classmates.

The first was a drama club production she was in as a student,
The Rope Dancers,
a Tony-nominated play from 1958

written by Morton Wishengrad, about an Irish-American couple whose daughter was born with six fi ngers. Piper played opposite a friend, John Speer, and in the play Speer’s character pleaded with Piper’s, asking her to show love for their daughter. “Kiss her and show her your love,” he im-plored. Piper’s character, the shrewish wife, refused.

“In the play, Piper’s character couldn’t love her child,”

Speer would recall much later. “In real life, it would turn out that perhaps Piper loved her children too much.”

After the play, a friend told her she’d put on an incredible performance. Piper’s comment in response would also be recalled years later, only in starkly different terms. “Piper said she liked acting because it felt good to dress up in a costume and pretend to be another person,” says the friend.

“I asked why she would want to be someone else, and she said it was fun to fool people into thinking she was someone she wasn’t.”

The other incident involved a classmate who had a serious car accident but emerged without a scrape. “You had an angel on your shoulder looking after you,” Piper told the girl.

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At first blush it seemed an innocuous thing to say, something anyone might utter when a person escaped what appeared to be certain injury or death. But Piper went on, explaining that she believed angels were present in the world, controlling events, and that if they were listened for, they could serve as life guides. “We all have angels we live with every day.”

She was so serious, seemed so literal about it, that the friend remarked to another, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Piper.”