Practice to Deceive

new boss and Peggy Sue. With her office being in their home, she couldn’t help but overhear their arguments, and she was far too close to many of Peggy’s financial machinations. Vickie liked working at the Double Eagle Ranch, but being at Peggy’s beck and call every day allowed her to see small fissures in the perfect image she had initially seen in her best friend.
    Peggy Sue had been Vickie’s rock, the one person she believed she could count on. Being an unwilling ear-witness to Mark and Peggy’s arguments could be dismaying. Vickie knew that Peggy was interested in money, but she had also thought that she sincerely loved Mark Allen when she married him.
    A few months into the marriage, Vickie wasn’t so sure about that.
    Jim Huden had been gone for more than three years and Peggy rarely spoke of him or seemed to care what had happened to him. According to Vickie, beyond Mark, there weren’t any men in Peggy’s life.
    Life on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, wasn’t nearly as exciting as driving a limousine in Las Vegas, and although Peggy had pretended to be interested in horses, she really wasn’t. Mark spent so much time out in the stables and ring with his head trainer, Chip Woolley. She resented that. And she didn’t care for most of the people who worked for Mark on the ranch.
    Mark had bought the gelding without much promise from a breeder in Canada, the small horse that was born with splayed legs. Somehow, despite his physical handicaps, Mine That Bird had won four out of six races at the Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto. In 2008, “Bird” was voted the Canadian Champion two-year-old Male Horse.
    Running in the 2008 Breeder’s Cup Juvenile race, Mine That Bird came in dead last. But Mark believed in him, and the small horse had heart. He won two more races, and he qualified for the Kentucky Derby!
    His odds weren’t good: fifty to one. Peggy couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
    She hated the way most of the ranch hands ignored her, answering only to Mark. If Peggy made remarks or did something to ruffle their feathers and Mark called her on it, she blamed Vickie. She said it was Vickie’s fault, that Vickie was the one who had complained about them.
    “Oh, don’t be mad at her,” Peggy would say. “Vickie didn’t really mean that.”
    Mark continued to be bighearted with Vickie Boyer. When one of her brothers died, Mark gave Vickie five hundred dollars to buy a plane ticket home for his funeral. When her aunt died in Wisconsin, Mark asked Peggy to give Vickie a thousand dollars. She did, but Peggy wasn’t happy about that.
    Mark was easygoing and trusted people.
    “To him,” Vickie said, “a handshake was a contract. He was a good businessman but he believed most people were as good as their word.”
    Once Mark and Peggy had their new bedroom with its outside door, Vickie was relieved that she could no longer hear most of their quarrels. But Peggy often complained to her about Mark. That puzzled her best friend.
    “She had everything she’d always wanted: money, a good man who loved her, fabulous vacations, a husband who was kind and generous to her daughters and parents, anything she wanted. But she still complained.”
    Peggy Sue had always been soft-spoken , using her subtle wiles to seduce men. Still, sometime in early 2008, Vickie became concerned for her.
    “Peggy started yelling and screaming. That scared me because she had never done that before.”
    When she and Mark disagreed, he wouldn’t fight back. As she screamed at him, Mark simply stepped back, waiting for Peggy to calm down. She had become a different person from the woman he married. He was seeing a side of her he’d never encountered before.
    Before Christmas 2007, Mark had asked Vickie to buy two airplane tickets and make reservations at a posh resort in one of the Grand Cayman Islands in the western Caribbean Sea. It would be the ideal place where he and Peggy Sue could relax and enjoy each other, and hopefully sand down some of the rough spots in their fledgling marriage.
    It sounded as though they were working their problems out, but just before they were to leave, Mark and Peggy Sue had a serious fight.
    In view of that, Mark said he wouldn’t go to the Grand Caymans. Peggy Sue would have to find someone else who might like to share that exotic—but now ruined—vacation with her.
    But no one wanted to go with her,” Vickie recalled. “In the end, with Mark’s permission, I said I’d