Practice to Deceive

  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 with Doris, her parents long since divorced.

  Tragically, Jimmie and his third wife, Terry, lost her son—Josh—when he, too, was twenty-one. Jimmie had raised Josh since he was in fifth or sixth grade and loved him as he did his biological sons. Josh was killed in a fiery car crash in Salt Lake City in 1995.

  Jimmie’s red hair turned stark white as he tried to deal with losing so many people he cared about to violence.

  And the world moved on.

  * * *

  AMY HAD MARRIED IN 1978, Rhonda in 1980, Lana in 1981, Brenda, Mike, and Sue in 1987, and Tom in 1989. Several of Jimmie’s children would go on to happier second marriages, although Amy Alton DeBoer’s marriage lasted. Lana Galbraith never remarried after she divorced Steve Galbraith. Peggy Sue married Tony Harris, a preacher in a somewhat different religion than her Baptist roots, but it didn’t last long. Tony was black and, jokingly, Peggy told her half sisters that she married Tony just to get her father’s goat. They believed her. She had always said she was going to marry a black man just to “bug” her father. Jimmie Stackhouse had always hung both an American and a Rebel flag on his property.

  It was getting more difficult to keep the family together, although all the Stackhouse daughters worked hard at it. Rob was gone, of course, and Tom and Mike married and drifted far away—Tom to California and Mike to Connecticut and then Virginia. For a time, Tom seemed to disconnect from his father and siblings. After he helped Jimmie build his first log house in Idaho, many years passed between Tom’s visits home to the Northwest. He would reconnect one day when his family was in chaos. Mike tried to call Jimmie once a week.

  Most of the girls—now women—stayed close, and family photo albums filled up with pictures of them and their husbands and many children.

  Peggy Sue followed in her father’s footsteps; she joined the navy in 1988. She had always done well at whatever she chose to do. Once more, she played basketball in the navy, and also became a highly skilled aircraft mechanic before she was honorably discharged in 1992.

  Peggy Sue had met and married Kelvin Thomas in 1991 while she was still in the navy. Kelvin, too, was African American, but he wasn’t anything like Tony. Compared to Peggy’s first husband, Kelvin was a nice, normal guy, who was well respected on Whidbey Island. He and Peggy talked of having a family, and tried to find a way to have more than a paycheck-to-paycheck financial situation. They hoped to have a lot of money one day, and they tried various avenues to get there.

  While Kelvin got a job as a cook in a Denny’s restaurant, they once joined a class-action suit to sue Denny’s for racial discrimination, and Kelvin probably got a modest settlement. The couple were living in Jacksonville, Florida, but they applied for jobs at B.F. Goodrich in Washington, and they were both hired. They moved home to Whidbey Island just after Mariah was born.

  Kelvin Thomas’s business as a personal trainer was going well. They were both athletically inclined. Peggy still worked out at Langley High School, exercising and both playing and coaching basketball with girls much younger than she was. Many of her glory days as a teenager had revolved around her skill at that sport.

  Peggy was no longer fragile; she had grown to be a very large woman, standing over six feet tall in her bare feet, but she was perfectly proportioned as long as she watched her weight carefully. She was Amazonian—and extremely attractive to most men who met her.

  Peggy and Kelvin had one daughter—and then a second—and they proved to be good parents to Mariah and Taylor, both of whom had red-blondish curly hair, adorable faces, and high intelligence.

  Peggy Sue told her half sisters that a photo of Mariah reading a book, her chin propped on her hands, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey herself as the model for a statue she had commissioned to encourage children to read.

  They didn’t know if that was true or not.

  But that was Peggy; she was
a chameleon—both in her life and her looks. In some photographs, she had a slender figure and a sculptured, perfect face. In others, particularly her pregnancy pictures, her features appeared bloated and her midsection big enough to carry triplets.

  Peggy did put on a lot of weight during her pregnancies, expanding so much that she didn’t look at all like the “fiery red” woman who would emerge later as glamour personified. Peggy Sue had fought weight her whole life, but when she was slim she was gorgeous.

  “Drop-Dead Gorgeous,” as the news media would nickname her.

  One day, Island County prosecuting attorney Greg Banks would comment that she was a woman who was capable of continually “reinventing herself.”

  That was certainly true.

  But no one could ever say that Peggy Sue wasn’t loved, however she looked or whoever she was. She sometimes complained, however, that her father didn’t show her enough affection. Her half sister Rhonda told her to quit worrying about it, saying, “Dad is just Dad.” Kelvin loved her, although she suspected that he sometimes strayed. Jimmie continued to dote on his “precious baby girl,” and in his eyes, Peggy Sue could do no wrong, but he wasn’t demonstrative. She was still tightly bonded to her mother, who had always treated her like a princess.

  Wherever Peggy was, Doris Alton Stackhouse Matz was there, too. They were almost a matched set, a duo that drew “Do not cross” borders around their world.

  Jimmie’s first three daughters still resented the way Doris shut them out just as she had when they were children.

  “The straw that broke my back,” Rhonda says, “was how Doris favored Peggy’s two girls over all of our kids. One time, I was over at Peggy’s with Brenda’s son, Kyle Gard, and Doris came over to get Mariah and Taylor, Peggy’s daughters. She was going to take them to the beach, and she said, ‘Come on, girls—we’re going to the beach!’

  “She didn’t ask Kyle and he was just heartbroken. He stood in the driveway, holding his arms out and crying as they drove away. That was when I knew for sure that we would always be third place in Doris’s world.”

  Nevertheless, all the half sisters remained in what looked like a solid family unit with birthday parties, baby showers, weddings, and other get-togethers. They filled countless scrapbooks with photographs, newspaper clippings, and mementos. When she was in town, Peggy Sue was almost always in those celebrations. Usually, her half sister Sue was the driving force to keep their wildly blended family close. Sue undertook the task of writing a kind of family tree with all their births, marriages, and deaths noted.

  In their case, it was difficult to follow the action without a “scorecard.”

  Peggy Sue and Kelvin didn’t become rich overnight, but they were doing quite well.

  Peggy excelled in her job in Everett with B.F. Goodrich, and soon became the first woman ever promoted to lead mechanic with the company. She liked her job, but she quit, saying that she wanted to spend more time with her daughters.

  She also went to beauty school, and earned her beautician’s license in Idaho. She worked at a number of Langley salons: Atelier, Studio A, and opened her own salon—Baker Street Hair Theater. During tourist season, there were any number of wealthy women who sought out island beauty salons.

  Peggy Sue sometimes helped Kelvin with the clients in his personal trainer business. In time, they made enough to buy a house in Langley, the house that Peggy would one day rent to Brenna Douglas.

  * * *

  ON JUNE 20, 1987, Doris’s oldest daughter, “Sweet Sue,” was married for the second time. Her first, very young marriage hadn’t worked out. But this was a joyful wedding and reception. Her half sisters were happy to attend. Sue and Neil Mahoney were a true love match. Sue was in her early thirties and it was a wonderful happy occasion. They had found the loves of their lives. Sue brought a son into their marriage and they soon had a daughter together.

  Neil, forty-four, grew up in West Seattle. When he graduated from high school in 1971, he worked and studied until he became a journeyman wireman, and belonged to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, and also taught electrical apprentices. He loved sports of all kinds and was an avid bicycle enthusiast. He also played the trombone and guitar.

  That was probably how he connected to Jim Huden, playing in some of the bands Jim put together. As it is with many small communities, there were many connections among Whidbey Island residents.

  Doris’s oldest daughter was the “Sweet Sue” whom Jim Huden often visited on his trips home from Florida, but he wasn’t able to attend Sue and Neil’s wedding.

  Jim might also have known of Peggy Sue before. Still, she was so much younger than he that they were like two sailboats tacking away from one another.

  And, of course, when Peggy married Kelvin four years after the Mahoneys’ wedding, Jim was far away in Florida, wed to his second wife, Jean.

  If they had never met, it might have—probably would have—been better for everyone.

  Sue and Neil Mahoney were to have only five years together. Two weeks after their fifth wedding anniversary, Neil wasn’t at his job with an electric company, but he agreed to do a favor for his boss. He rode his bike to pick up his employer’s van, and then delivered it to a garage for a regular maintenance check. Neil retrieved his bike from the van and headed for home in Edmonds.

  A car struck him, leaving him in critical condition with multiple injuries. Sue had to make a decision that no loving wife should ever have to make. Neil was in a coma and showed no brain activity. She finally agreed to have him taken off the breathing machine and he died. He was only forty-nine.

  Jim Huden was anguished when he got the news and he headed for Neil’s memorial service and wake as quickly as he could. On June 8, 2002, after gathering a band from among some of their old friends, Jim played and sang at both the Edgewood Baptist Church service and the Irish wake afterward.

  Peggy Sue was there, of course. Sue, the widow, was her half sister. Everyone had loved Neil Mahoney and the enormity of his tragic death drew so many friends and relatives that the memorial service and wake were crowded wall-to-wall.

  Although they had always moved on the periphery of each other’s lives, Jim Huden and Peggy Sue Thomas were so far apart in age in their younger years. He was a man when she was still a child. Now they were drawn to one another on this sad day in June. The spark lit then, even in the midst of mourning, was impossible not to notice. They were both married to other people, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  The air between them fairly crackled with electricity and mutual attraction.

  Even so, both of them stayed married to other people for a time, but they were together every chance they got.

  When Peggy found out that her husband, Kelvin, was also having an affair, she was shocked. He was dating a woman older than she was! That stung. It may have been the first time a man ever walked away from her. For all intents and purposes, their marriage was over and they divorced.

  It was a friendly divorce and both of them continued to put their daughters, Taylor and Mariah, first, sharing custody and parenting decisions.

  No matter that Peggy and Kelvin went their separate ways with new partners, Kelvin always had Peggy Sue’s back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  PEGGY SUE STILL SMARTED over the fact that Kelvin had chosen another woman over her. She needed to validate her own attractiveness. And she needed a female “wing woman” to help her achieve something big that would restore her confidence.

  For a while in 2002, Peggy Sue and Cindy Francisco were best buddies. They always attended shows at the China City comedy night. It didn’t take long for the crowd to notice them. Peggy Sue often heckled the comic onstage. They sat in front and got up frequently and left to order drinks, making themselves the center of attention.

  Finally, one comedian decided to put a stop to all the interruptions during his routine. While the two women were out of the room, he asked the crowd to laugh at them
when they came back.

  “You don’t need a reason,” he directed. “But I need a break; just laugh out loud when they come back in.”

  The crowd obeyed, and Peggy Sue and Cindy couldn’t figure out what was so funny. The third time this happened they didn’t enjoy all the attention and their prancing in and out slowed down.

  The restaurant was very popular in Freeland, and the building that housed it was large and impressive. It attracted many locals. It still does.

  Cathy Hatt and her husband, Dean, lived next door to Dick Deposit’s second house, and they watched over it when Deposit was away on one of his frequent trips. They handed out the key if Deposit told them whom to expect.

  The Hatts were also frequent diners at China City and Dean often sang along on Karaoke Night. They watched as Peggy Sue flirted with men sitting at the bar.

  “I saw her move in on one of my friend’s boyfriends one night,” Cathy recalls. “My friend was in the ladies’ room and Peggy was all over her boyfriend when she came back. I actually thought there was going to be a fight.” When 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.”