Practice to Deceive

Cathy’s friend objected to Peggy Sue’s physical advances to her fiancé, Peggy Sue stood up and turned around slowly, showing off her figure, and then she said, “Why would he want you when he could have this?”
    Peggy Sue ran her hands seductively over her body and posed, and it took Cathy and several of their friends to stop a catfight. Peggy didn’t care; she just laughed.
    Cathy Hatt recalls one early summer evening.
    “We were at a fiftieth birthday party for Ron Young—down on the beach—and Jim Huden was there. There were tents put up so no one would have to drive home drunk afterward. Peggy arrived later. Most of us thought she had her eye on Dick Deposit, but one of my friends said, ‘No, she’s with someone else. I can’t tell you who it is.’ ”
    Cathy didn’t have to ask who it was. An hour or so later, she saw Peggy Sue crawling out of Jim Huden’s tent, carrying a half-empty bottle of Royal Crown. “It was only about eight or nine in the evening, but she was very drunk.”
    Cathy is petite, and standing next to six-foot-tall Peggy, she looked even smaller.
    “Peggy never seemed to remember me,” Cathy said. “Dean and I were sharing a night out with Dick Deposit at China City, and I found myself standing next to Peggy Sue.
    “She looked down at me, and she had a really condescending tone in her voice when she said, ‘Do I know you?’
    “I told her who I was, and she wasn’t impressed. A week or so later, she was standing next to me again, and again, she asked me, ‘Do I know you?’ I just gave up—and said, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”
    When Peggy Sue figured out that Cathy and Dean Hatt were friends of Jim Huden, she was nicer to them.
    After Peggy and Jim moved to Las Vegas, one day she went to pick him up at the airport.
    “She had rented a Mercedes Benz and was wearing a tight, one-piece, black leather outfit,” Cathy said. “She told me, ‘All I’m wearing to the airport is a can of whipped cream.’ ”
    Cathy remembered Jim and Peggy driving up to Dick Deposit’s house on or about December 19, 2003. Rather, she saw Peggy.
    “She told me that Jim was really, really sick that night. I never did actually see him on that Christmas trip. After they left,” Cathy said, “Dick Deposit called me to ask if they had left his house key with Dean or me. And I really don’t think they did.”
    Peggy could turn on the charm and seduce anyone she aimed for—both men and women. She wasn’t interested in women sexually—not at all—and she had few women friends. But she usually had a best friend. One or another “best friend forever” came and went in her life.
    There were two very large families in Langley—the Stackhouses and the Boyers. Vickie Boyer’s mother bore eighteen children— outnumbering even Jimmie’s brood.
    Vickie was one of the younger children and she was sickly. No one in her family expected her to live long. When Clifford Peerenboom proposed to her, she was only fourteen. Her mother knew she was too young—but then she felt Vickie probably wouldn’t live beyond nineteen or twenty and deserved to have some kind of a life. Vickie married Clifford and she didn’t die; instead she suffered through a long and controlling marriage. As the nineties began, she had finally gathered the courage to divorce her husband. When Peggy Thomas befriended her, it made Vickie feel happier and more secure. She dropped her married name at once and went back to her maiden name. She and Peggy Sue were both coming out of the end of their marriages, and it seemed that they had so much in common.
    Peggy, who stood a head taller than Vickie, was the confident one, and Vickie was more dependent after so many years in her emotionally abusive marriage.
    Despite warnings from one of her sisters, Vickie and Peggy became close friends within a short time.
    When Peggy made up her mind to enter the Ms. Washington contest, Vickie helped in any way she could; she raised money, distributed signs, and got Peggy as much publicity and media interest as she could.
    Vickie was almost as thrilled as Peggy Sue was when she won the beauty pageant. They had done it together, and their friendship was solid as a rock. At least it seemed so to Vickie Boyer.
    Peggy Sue Thomas’s photograph appeared on television and in any number of newspapers. She wore a figure-clinging gown and the sparkling rhinestone crown on her head seemed made for her. She was in her glory.
    The next step was a