Practice to Deceive

that Brenna’s plan to buy her house hadn’t materialized. She had told Werksman that it was against Brenna’s financial interest for Russ “not to be around.”
    “Yeah,” Werksman added. “When Russ was alive, there was the hope that she, Brenna, would buy the house.”
    The interview wound around and around like a spinning top, the lines at the top disappearing into the vortex, but they came out changed. Peggy Thomas insisted that she and Jim had taken the Keystone ferry to Bill Marlow’s house on December 26—after they left Dick Deposit’s house.
    “He and his wife were the only ones there,” she said. “They must have forgotten.”
    One thing was clear to the three detectives. For a woman who had allegedly been passionate about Jim Huden, Peggy Sue Thomas had no compunction about throwing him to the wolves, trying to find reasons he was “wacky” and impetuous and capable of murder.
    * * *
    A S HE WENT OVER all the reports that came across his desk, Mark Plumberg was accounting for every time, every minute that Peggy and Jim had been on Whidbey Island during the 2003 Christmas season. He was also ferreting out seemingly insignificant slips, different versions of the same situation, and peculiar comments. It was akin to stringing a line full of tiny Christmas lights. Every once in a while, something didn’t match. That tended to make the entire rope of “lights” go black.
    Taken separately, those jarring mismatches didn’t matter all that much. As a whole, Plumberg believed that someone had to be lying.
    This was most assuredly not a slam-dunk case. The circumstantial evidence was mushrooming, but it wasn’t enough to arrest anyone on murder charges.
    The homicide case on the shooting death of Russel Douglas remained open.

PART SEVEN
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The Stackhouse Family: 1963–2002

C HAPTER T WENTY-ONE
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    J IM HUDEN WAS MISSING, and could possibly be dead—a suicide. That was what his wife, Jean, said she was afraid of. Back on Whidbey Island, Mark Plumberg moved along a winding path toward what he hoped would be the truth. He had met all of the principals who might have even a sliver of knowledge about Russ Douglas’s murder.
    All except Peggy Sue Thomas. He had spoken with her on the phone and found her easygoing and accessible—unlike Brenna Douglas, whose emotions were so erratic that they were almost impossible to chart.
    Plumberg had heard talk on the island that Peggy Sue’s very large family, fathered by Jimmie Stackhouse, had suffered many tragedies in the past. Indeed, there was an almost “Kennedyesque” sense about them, a black cloud of violence, misfortune, and sudden death that seemed to stalk them.
    If Peggy Sue Thomas did have any complicity or guilty knowledge that would help close the Russel Douglas homicide case, Plumberg needed to find out as much as he could about her.
    A vicious, sadistic murder that occurred two states away and forty years earlier had made Peggy’s father, Jimmie, a widower with six children to raise.
    The tragedies that Jimmie Stackhouse and his family endured had nothing whatsoever to do with Peggy Sue. She was born on September 2, 1965—two years and three months after Mary Ellen Stackhouse, Jimmie’s first wife, was murdered at the age of thirty-two.
    Jimmie Stackhouse would surely have remained with his original family—his wife and six children—and he wouldn’t have been a single man when he met the woman who would bear his seventh child.
    That baby, of course, was Peggy Sue Stackhouse.
    Almost every family, traced back generations, reveals startling and disturbing events, some best left unexamined. If ever there was a family damned to tragedy and pain, it was Jimmie Stackhouse’s. I share that family surname, although I haven’t found any direct connections—for which I am thankful. Again and again, those on the family tree underwent unbelievable losses. Jimmie Stackhouse suffered so many.
    * * *
    I N THE EARLY SUMMER of 1963, despite the many blows in Jimmie Stackhouse’s early life, he had some happier times. Jimmie spent his adult life serving in the navy as a chief petty officer, service he was proud of. By the time he was thirty-one, his life was complete with everything a man might wish for. A perfect family. A career he loved.
    Jimmie met the girl he would marry on Whidbey Island. Mary Ellen Hower came from a very wealthy extended family back in Findley, Ohio. The Howers started the Quaker Oats company, and lived in a