Practice to Deceive

with a much older boy. She needed a reason to stay out late, and wanted Rhonda to say she was staying overnight with her. But Rhonda shook her head. She was not going to lie for her baby sister.
    A few years after that, Jimmie and Doris Stackhouse were obviously becoming estranged. She was gone a lot, leaving his older girls to run the house, but she eventually came home.
    Jimmie retired from the service as a Master Chief when he was thirty-nine and relocated to his former home state of Idaho in 1973. He bought a home in Bonner’s Ferry. That house burned to the ground, and Jimmie set about building a very large log cabin–style home. His son Tom helped him. It was almost as if Jimmie hoped that a strong house, built with his own hands, could keep his family safe.
    Doris didn’t like it there and there were other arguments. She wanted to be close to her family on the coast—her mother, brother, and sister. Shortly thereafter, she moved back to Bellingham and the couple split up. They filed for a legal separation and then divorced. Doris and Peggy Sue moved to Bellingham, Washington.
    In 1984, both Jimmie and Doris remarried—Doris to a wealthy older man named Paul Matz, and Jimmie to his third wife, Terry Little. The log house Jimmie and Tom built burned down, too. Undeterred, Jimmie built another log house, larger than the last.
    And Paul Matz bought the farmhouse on Edgecliff Drive on Whidbey Island that Doris had always wanted.
    Doris and Jimmie’s divorce was hardest on the most sensitive members of the family, Amy and Brenda. Amy was so upset about it that she lost control of her mother’s car on the way to high school one morning and wrecked it. Fortunately, she survived with slight injuries.
    Shortly after high school graduation, Amy married Mr. DeBoer and soon gave birth to six children, one after the other.
    Although Doris had taught Jimmie’s girls to bake, they really couldn’t cook—but Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda learned fast.
    Before he settled down with Terry, Jimmie was single for a time. He was still a ruggedly handsome man, much sought after by single women. It was he who taught his girls how to cook the basic things they needed to know. They were, of course, already adept at baking.
    “We did the shopping, too,” Rhonda recalls. “My dad would give us money to buy groceries and he didn’t seem to mind when we bought other things we needed from the market—mascara, shampoo, makeup.
    “I remember cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner when I was sixteen. It turned out fine, except no one told me to take the bag of giblets out of the turkey before I roasted it.”
    When Jimmie Stackhouse married Terry Little in December 1984, his tally of children expanded once again. He was now stepfather to Jason, twelve, Tiffany, ten, and Josh, nine. That made an even dozen children that Jimmie had supported during his adult years.
    He cared about them all, but Jimmie and his offspring had suffered through another tragic homicide almost two years before he married Terry. Rob Stackhouse, twenty-one, the last baby that Mary Ellen gave birth to, had joined the navy right out of high school. He was a big man—six feet, five inches and about 250 pounds. Rob was handsome, blond, and easygoing, as big men often are; Rob had nothing to prove and was a gentle giant.
    On January 21, 1983, shortly after he was mustered out of the service, Rob attended a house party in Alaska. Despite his misgivings, Rob agreed to an arm-wrestling contest with another of the male guests who had clearly had too much to drink. Of course, Rob won easily and the loser was enraged. He pulled out a gun and began to fire wildly at the house, over the heads of partygoers.
    Afraid the man might actually hit someone, Rob lifted him up by his armpits, took away his gun, and placed it on a car hood. He struck the drunk in the chest to get his full attention, and said, “You’re gonna kill somebody!”
    Humiliated and angered further, the shooter pulled another gun out of his belt.
    Rob had no idea it was there. In a split second, the shooter pulled the trigger on his second gun and fatally wounded Rob Stackhouse.
    Once again, murder had struck the Stackhouse family. Rob’s life had barely begun, he had never married, and he was one of the kindest members of their family. His death hit them all hard.
    Rob and Peggy Sue were close in age, only a little over three years apart. When Rob was killed, she was seventeen and living in Bellingham