Practice to Deceive

go.”
    It was not a pleasant trip. All the expensive restaurant visits and Patrón tequila had made Peggy Sue’s slender Vegas body a thing of the past. Most days, she didn’t want to go to the pool or the beach where someone might see her. When she did go, she wore “old lady” bathing suits that covered her from her shoulders to her knees.
    “We mostly stayed in the room,” Vickie said. “For four or five days, with all that wonderful scenery in the Caymans and so much we could have done, Peggy wouldn’t go out, and it wasn’t fun for me to go out alone.”
    Peggy ate and drank her way through what should have been days in the sun. Vickie was vastly relieved when they finally boarded a plane for New Mexico.
    More and more now, Peggy Sue was stockpiling money and things she wanted to keep. She showed Vickie a storage unit where she had secreted a small sports car, jewelry, and a rare John Wayne gun. She wanted Vickie to hide the pontoon boat in another storage unit. Vickie refused. Peggy had convinced Mark that they should store the pontoon craft and he agreed as long as it was close by. In actuality, Jimmie Stackhouse soon hooked onto it and towed it behind his truck to his place in Idaho.
    Peggy was certainly acting like a woman who was anxious to be single again. But she didn’t want to be single and poor again.
    Peggy dipped deeply into the bank account she shared with Mark. She took $354,000 from that account and deposited it into a Wells Fargo account that was solely in her name.
    Vickie didn’t know about that at first, but she found out and was relieved when Mark managed to reverse that huge transaction.
    She realized that Peggy was stealing smaller amounts from Mark, too. Mark had given her ten thousand dollars to pay the pool man. She never did. Instead, Peggy put the money into her own account.
    When Vickie asked her why she was putting things in the storage unit, and diverting funds into her own bank, Peggy Sue just smiled and said inscrutably, “Because you never know . . .”
    What did she mean by that?
    Vickie Boyer was concerned that Peggy Sue was going to dump Mark as soon as she had enough stockpiled in her storage units and bank accounts. That would probably hurt him a lot because he seemed to have tried everything to make his bride happy.
    Peggy Sue asked Vickie to spy on Mark, pore over his accounts and investments so she would know exactly what his assets were.
    “I couldn’t do that,” Vickie said. “For the first time ever, I lied to Peggy and told her I couldn’t find any information on Mark.”
    There was no telling how much Peggy might receive in a bitter divorce. Still, Vickie wasn’t worried that Peggy would physically hurt Mark. He could take care of himself.
    That changed one night when Peggy Sue and Vickie were sitting in a local bar, talking to a regular there, a man named Ollie. Peggy had had a great deal to drink and she was upset about yet another disagreement with Mark.
    After listening to her complain, Ollie—who was none too sober himself—offered, “I could take him out for you.”
    “I have his gun,” Peggy said slowly. “A John Wayne hand gun. . .”
    Ollie saw the humor in that. “Wouldn’t that be ironic,” he said, “to shoot a guy with his own gun?”
    “But this time I’ll know to throw it in the water,” Peggy commented.
    Vickie, who wasn’t drinking because she was the designated driver, heard that and suddenly everything came clear. She had never believed that Peggy was connected to the murder of Russel Douglas. Peggy Sue might need to be the belle of the ball wherever she went, and she could be mean sometimes, but Vickie had always put up with it because that was just Peggy Sue.
    Afraid for Mark, Vickie took the gun away from Peggy.
    “But I thought about it and thought about it. When she said that about throwing a gun in the water, I knew in my heart that she was really evil .”
    Vickie feared for Mark Allen’s life, even more so when Peggy said to her, “If he dies, I’ll get everything. I’ll be the one telling the ranch hands what to do.”
    Vickie called Allen and told him about the conversation in the bar. “And I have your gun; I got Peggy to give it to me,” she said. “And I told him about the things Peggy had said in the bar. Mark agreed to pick it up or have her bring it to him, but he himself was beginning to worry about how far his bride might go.
    “In the end,” Vickie recalls, “he arranged to have a