Practice to Deceive

ass. You were so damn drunk you don’t even know what you said to strangers, let alone your friend. I brushed it off, but no more! Don’t fucking tell me about using people, Peggy. Don’t tell me how it was all me using you. You know better. You know I did everything you asked.”
    Vickie recalled Peggy’s conversation with Ollie in the bar. “By the way, while you were disgustingly talking about taking Mark out, you said, ‘This time I will know to throw the gun in the water. ’ ”
    Peggy responded scathingly. “You are such a fucking liar, Vickie . . . Ollie jokingly asked if I wanted him to take Mark out and I said, ‘No way!’ I explained to him what I’d been through with Jim, and I didn’t want to hurt Mark. I wanted all of this shit to be over. You know damn well I never said anything about throwing anything in the water because I didn’t have anything to do with that shit Jim did . . .”
    Peggy’s email was an example of how she had always before managed to convince Vickie that she was right. She insisted that Vickie knew “in her heart” that she had always been innocent, and that she had maintained that to everyone and never, ever said she was guilty.
    But Peggy Sue had been intoxicated when she blurted out her regret about not getting rid of the gun—the gun that Jim Huden had used to shoot Russ Douglas. And Vickie was drinking ginger ale. She had no doubts at all about what Peggy had blurted out in the bar. That was why she had talked Peggy out of the gun and seen that it was returned to Mark Allen.
    Peggy accused Vickie of keeping any potential friends away from her because Vickie was jealous.
    “So, Vickie, throw out your low blow and try and threaten me with me saying something that I didn’t. That hurts more than anything, and you might as well just put a knife through my heart.”
    Peggy told Vickie to keep the $35,000 and the truck Mark had given her, but she predicted that Vickie would never have integrity. Ironically, she emailed that she had finally discovered how wicked Vickie was.
    “I guess I am the fortunate one to have finally seen it.”
    Peggy Sue sarcastically wished that Vickie would be happy, and ended with a flourish of guilt, saying that she would never have any contact with Vickie—and blaming her once-faithful friend for hurting her (Peggy) more than anyone ever had.
    “Remember what you told me. You only get in this life what you give. I hope you get yours . . .”
    Peggy Sue had accused Vickie of subtly threatening her about the Ollie conversation, and now there was little question that Peggy was threatening, too. She sounded very angry—and frightened—that she would be connected to Jim Huden in the murder of Russel Douglas.
    The two longtime friends never met again. Mark Plumberg included the exchange of emails in his constantly expanding case file.
    Even after Peggy was banned from Mark Allen’s property, her mother, Doris, remained living in her cozy motor home at the Double Eagle Ranch. Always a superb baker, she took Mark cupcakes and cookies. She was, of course, a constant reminder of his unpleasant months with his red-haired bride, and Mark finally managed to get Doris to leave.

C HAPTER T WENTY-SEVEN
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    P EGGY SUE HERSELF LAY low on her houseboat. She was terribly angry with Vickie, and felt betrayed. Looking back over so many years, Vickie seems to have always been in Peggy’s corner, even before the Ms. Washington contest.
    But she had seen and heard too much of Peggy Sue’s machinations to continue to follow her every decree.
    Suddenly, Peggy’s world had imploded on her. She had no husband, no best friend, no job, and few supporters. Taylor and Mariah were always there for their mother, Jimmie Stackhouse stayed close to his youngest daughter, and Kelvin Thomas, new girlfriend or not, was concerned about his ex-wife.
    In the fall of 2008, Russel Douglas’s murder was now almost five years in the past, and once her fight with Vickie sputtered to an end, Peggy Sue didn’t seem outwardly concerned about the continuing investigation far away on Whidbey Island.
    If she hadn’t been named more than a “person of interest” after so many years, it didn’t seem likely the sheriff’s detectives had any kind of evidence—circumstantial or physical—connecting her to Douglas’s death.
    Perhaps Peggy Sue was unaware that the search warrant served on her house in Henderson, Nevada, in 2004 had revealed the operation manual for the Bersa