Practice to Deceive

means to an end—usually wealth—for Peggy Sue Thomas, and I suspect she doesn’t really like them. She is so attractive that she is likely to get mail from men on the outside who will be eager to send her money for extras and treats from the prison commissary. But she already has family who will try to make her as comfortable as possible. Kelvin Thomas, her second husband, will undoubtedly continue to stand behind her. If her mother, Doris, is in good health, she will see that Peggy Sue gets everything she wants—given the constrictions of incarceration.
    Mariah and Taylor will visit her as often as they can.
    And Peggy does have scores of former limousine clients who may get in touch with her when they learn that she is spending the next four years behind bars.
    Will she see a ghost in her cell when the lights are dimmed? Probably not. Peggy Sue appeared to forget Russel Douglas within a week or so of his murder. It is Jim Huden who has been haunted by the image of the man in his gun sight.
    I think the lack of freedom to come and go may be the worst punishment for Peggy Thomas. I have never been sent to prison, but I have visited any number of felons there. Although I am inside for only a few hours, I dread the sound of iron doors clanging shut behind me. Even when Peggy Sue was a murder suspect, she was allowed to travel with that heavy GSR chained to her ankle.
    And now she can’t do that.
    Jim Huden has filed an appeal, but he still hasn’t said anything linking his former lover to the death of Russ Douglas.
    I discussed Huden’s stubborn loyalty to Peggy Sue with Mark Plumberg.
    “How could Jim Huden have become so obsessed with Peggy that he committed a murder for her?” I asked. “And then he accepted an eighty-year sentence to protect her when she doesn’t seem to care about him at all?”
    “I’ve thought about that a lot,” Mark said. “I think that Jim really loved Peggy, and that his protecting her and not ‘ratting’ out either Peggy or Brenna is, perhaps, the only nobility he has left.”
    Mark Plumberg would like nothing better than to talk to Jim Huden. “But I can’t right now because Jim has filed an appeal. I hope that someday we may have a conversation.”
    The Island County detective would also like to talk in depth to Brenna Douglas. She had no choice but to testify in Huden’s trial, but whenever investigators attempt to talk to her, she refuses to say anything more about her husband’s murder. They visited her once more after Peggy Sue was sentenced, but she refused to answer their questions.
    As things stand now, there isn’t any physical evidence to link Brenna to the plot to kill Russ.
    And that is ironic, because in the end, Brenna has been the only one who benefited financially from the murder. The insurance money is long gone. Brenna has moved frequently since she left Whidbey Island. She has not remarried, although Russel’s mother thinks she is currently dating someone. Brenna has gained a lot of weight over the past decade.
    Not surprisingly, the Stackhouse family has not survived all the tragedies intact. “We’ve been torn apart,” Rhonda Vogl says. “Our mother is gone, Robby’s gone, Brenda’s gone—and no one really gets along with each other anymore. I was invited to Peggy’s wedding to Mark Allen, but I had no idea who he was or when she had met him. Nothing. I didn’t attend the ceremony.
    “Those members of our family who are left just aren’t close.”
    Jimmie Stackhouse has had to rebuild his magnificent Idaho log home twice because it was destroyed by fire on two separate occasions.
    * * *
    I N THE SOMETIMES EERIE way that my choices for book titles turn out to seem more than coincidental, it happened again. More than two decades after Rhonda lectured Peggy about lying, and long before I met or talked to any of its principal characters, I chose Practice to Deceive as the title for this book.
    When I first interviewed Rhonda Stackhouse Vogl, she asked what my book would be called. When I told her, an odd expression flickered across her face.
    Later, she sent me an email: “I was a little shocked,” she wrote. “That sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And then I remembered that night when Peggy Sue wanted me to lie and give her an alibi for her sneaky date. I wouldn’t do it, and I told her, ‘Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.’
    “It didn’t make much of an impression on her. She snuck