Practice to Deceive

Whidbey Island. Along with Sue and Amy, they rode their trikes and bikes all over the south end of the island, rushed down a well-worn trail to the beach every day where they scraped mussels off the pilings or caught minnows with fishing lines tied to their fingers—selling them to fishermen for bait. They swam like fishes themselves, bobbing in the waves. Langley was a small town then, where kids could count on free handouts from merchants: a cold hot dog from the Langley Meat Market or some treat from the grocer.
    If there was anywhere the Stackhouse children could begin to feel safe and heal, Langley would have been the place.
    Between Jimmie and Doris, they had eight children, all of them born between 1954 and 1961. Jimmie Stackhouse’s new semifamily seemed to be the answer to how he could take care of his motherless children.
    Jimmie was often out at night, going to bars and dating women. Doris told Rhonda how they decided to get married, but only after Rhonda was a grown woman.
    “I waited up for him one night,” Doris recalled. “When he finally got home, I told him, ‘There’s nothing out there that you can’t get right here.’ ”
    Within a year of Mary Ellen’s murder, Jimmie married Doris. Their wedding picture is of the couple with all of their children clustered around them. It might have worked in a movie of that era starring Julie Andrews and Jimmy Stewart or Doris Day and Henry Fonda. All the elements for a fictional happy ending were there, but this was real life, and no matter how serene the Stackhouse family might have seemed to neighbors and Jimmie’s navy buddies, it wasn’t.
    Like Mary Ellen before her, Doris kept a spotless house and was a great cook and seamstress. She was admired by those who lived in Langley for her self-sacrificing efforts to raise six motherless children along with her own two daughters. Still, the facade Doris Anderson Alton Stackhouse showed the world was only that—a facade.
    No one can see through the outside walls of someone else’s house, and Jimmie’s children by Mary Ellen felt that they were always treated like second-class citizens to Doris’s daughters.
    “Doris put on airs,” Rhonda recalls. “As if she was a loving, devoted mother—but she wasn’t. There were many times when we realized that we didn’t really matter to her.
    “One time, we all missed the school bus. Our brothers and Lana, Brenda, and I started walking in the rain. Then we saw Doris’s car, with Sue and Amy in it, but Doris drove right by us.”
    And soon, Doris was pregnant with Jimmie’s child. She would be the only baby they had together. Peggy Sue Stackhouse was born on September 2, 1965.
    She was an adorable baby with burnished auburn hair, much doted on by her father and her half siblings.
    “I finally got my redhead,” Jimmie crowed. He had always had flaming red hair, and he was covered with freckles from head-to-toe. But Peggy Sue was his first child to inherit those genes.
    “Of course we loved her when she was little,” Rhonda recalls. “But she was spoiled—and headstrong as she grew up.”
    With Peggy Sue’s birth, Jimmie’s older children moved another step down the ladder. “We were third best now.”
    Doris continued to impress people in Langley with her devotion to all her children. For reasons Mary Ellen’s children never understood, she had their birth certificates changed, removing their natural mother’s name, and replacing it with her own.
    She was, in her stepchildren’s opinion, “an angel on the street and a devil at home.” Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she presented herself to the Langley community as a long-suffering stepmother who was doing her best to raise six children who weren’t even hers. Some people saw her as heroic; others were suspicious of her saintly persona.
    “She fulfilled our basic needs,” Rhonda remembers. “We got all our shots, and went to the dentist regularly—but she didn’t even try to meet our emotional needs.”
    Doris was such an exceptional seamstress that she won a contest and received a top-of-the-line sewing machine, a model used by professionals. She was an artist when it came to sewing.
    She insisted that Jimmie’s girls take sewing lessons—which they hated—but were later grateful for.
    She also taught them how to maintain a perfect house. Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda were required to clean house on Tuesdays after school and all day Saturday. Doris wanted to be sure that all