Practice to Deceive

ill will toward Fran Lester. While Russ could be annoying and immature, Brenna was the one who had always seemed to be manipulating in the background.
    Brenna would agree to attend holiday celebrations or family reunions, and invariably back out at the last minute. When she and Russ did attend such functions, Brenna made a point of sitting far apart from the rest of the family.
    “We felt that Brenna was controlling Russ,” Gail said. “He wasn’t the one that was deliberately avoiding us.”
    One Thanksgiving, the family all went to Kalispell, Montana, to Gail’s sister’s home. The next day, Brenna and Russ went shopping and left baby Jack with Gail.
    They were gone long enough for Jack to start getting hungry. Gail warmed a jar of baby food and was feeding it to him when Brenna walked in the door.
    “What are you doing ?” Brenna shrieked.
    “He was so hungry—” Gail began.
    Brenna grabbed the baby food jar out of Gail’s hand and threw it into the sink.
    “We never warm his food,” she screamed. “He eats cold food!”
    Baffled, Gail stared at her daughter-in-law. She didn’t know of anyone who didn’t warm their small babies’ food.
    Clearly, Brenna was trying to control Russ and his family. She and his sister, Holly, had been close, but she drew away from Holly after Russ’s murder, and she refused to even discuss the details of the insurance policies he had.
    She derided Russ and his family for thinking education was important. Brenna was by no means dumb, but she hated schools and colleges.
    At another Montana family reunion, Brenna insisted that she and her family wouldn’t stay in the homes relatives had prepared for sleepovers. Instead, she insisted on staying in the RV she and Russ owned, and then she made him park far away from the group.
    That was not a good trip. They were all going to meet at a campground, and someone inadvertently gave Russ the wrong directions. When Gail discovered that, she tried to get in touch with them, but their cell phone was turned off. By retracing the turns along the way, the Douglases finally arrived—but they were forty-five minutes late.
    Brenna was furious. She screamed at Gail.
    “How dare you give me the wrong directions! I know you did it on purpose!”
    Brenna’s diabetic mother had surgery—a gastric by-pass—but complications set in, and she died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism and heart failure.
    “Russ took some of his 401(k) money to pay for his mother-in-law’s funeral,” Gail O’Neal said. “That was why he agreed to buy the second insurance policy on his own life. He told Brenna, ‘I don’t want that to happen to you. I want you taken care of.’ ”
    Brenna’s chaotic emotions and bad business sense weren’t positive influences in Russ’s life, but he was apparently doing his best at the time he was murdered. And his mother thanked his mistress for that.
    “Fran was key to helping my son grow up,” Gail said. “He did act like a self-indulgent kid sometimes, and Fran let him have it. When he whined about his miserable marriage, she told him, ‘Either get a divorce, or get into counseling.’
    “And he was beginning to change and stop feeling so sorry for himself. Before, he would call Brenna and threaten suicide if she wouldn’t take him back. Poor ‘Eeyore.’ All of a sudden, I said, ‘Oh my God—Russ has grown up.’
    “He was finally happy, but Brenna wasn’t. He was responsible—he paid child support and he paid spousal support, too. But I don’t think Brenna wanted him back.”
    Initially, Gail tried to help Brenna out of the financial mess her beauty salon books were in, and recommended a CPA who could help her. That annoyed her newly widowed daughter-in-law.
    Two remarks that Brenna Douglas made to Gail still disturb her. She doesn’t know what Brenna was trying to say. At first, Gail couldn’t believe that Brenna had anything at all to do with Russ’s murder, but as the circumstantial evidence piled up, she wondered.
    “I asked her a direct question once. And she was very snotty when she answered me. I asked her: ‘Have you ever thought—when you were working with your friend—Peggy Sue—that Russ was worth more dead to you than alive?’ ”
    Peggy Sue Thomas often worked at Just B’s as a hairdresser; she was Brenna’s landlady, and the two were close friends.
    “She said, ‘Well . . . I might have. ’ ”
    Later, Brenna suddenly burst out with an inscrutable remark:
    “If push