Sex. Murder. Mystery. (14 page)

A reply came postmarked Trinidad. Lorri recognized the handwriting as her stepmother’s.

“You have some nerve even writing to your father after how you’ve treated him!”

Lorri cried as she read Sharon’s bitchy string of hateful words. Sharon made it clear Lorri was not welcome and if she knew what was good for her, she’d back off. Once and for all.

“You used your father. Like the boy who cried wolf… you were always in a crisis! Help me! Those days are over. You’ve hurt Perry for the last time.’’

A door had been slammed shut; a wall had been built. The father and daughter who had once shared a precious closeness would remain estranged for two years.

Sharon Nelson, once more, got what she had wanted.

Chapter 9

MONEY FOR JULIE. MONEY FOR UNCLE SAM. MONEY to keep the business afloat. Money for Sharon. The outstretched hands were everywhere. Perry was close to busted and he knew it. As if she needed to do so, Sharon reminded her husband daily of their escalating financial troubles. And though the tax bills and business expenses were choking the life out of their bank account, it was Julie Nelson’s old charge accounts that made Sharon’s blood boil over. The way Sharon saw it, Julie, in a fit of justified spite, ran up bills all over town—all over Colorado for that matter. The local ladies’ shoe store, the Fashion Bar in Denver, a dress shop in the Springs. Sharon urged Perry to file bankruptcy so they could start over, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“I was raised to pay my debts,” he said.

“I was, too,” Sharon scoffed. She reminded Perry that she was his wife now. She shouldn’t be saddled with expenses rung up by the first wife. She knew there was no way out of the alimony and back child-support payments. The other stuff, forget it.

“I was not raised to pay debts that you and this woman incurred over a five-year period of time and didn’t disclose to me,” she said.

And still the money drain ran unchecked.

Rochelle Fuller called her mother from Ohio one morning before Sharon arrived at the Trinidad office. Barb Ruscetti took the call and promised the girl that she’d have her mother call her back as soon as she got in. When Sharon finished speaking with Rochelle later that day she made a beeline for the check register.

“I’m sending Rochelle four hundred dollars for a stereo,” she announced.

Barb couldn’t hide her exasperation. “Sharon, you can’t,” she said. “We don’t have the money.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’m paying the bills! I’m sending my daughter four hundred dollars.”

Perry emerged from examining a patient, and put the kibosh on the stereo.

“Let Rochelle’s dad buy her one,” he said.

Sharon stomped her feet. Her face went red with anger.

“I’m not doing without money anymore,” she said as she stormed out. “I’m sick and tired of it.”

As Barb saw it, Sharon was trying to win back her daughter’s affection. The only way she knew how to make herself feel better, make her daughters feel like she cared about them, was to buy presents to send.

“I don’t think her little girls loved her anymore,” Barb told a friend.

And despite the lack of money, her strained relations with her daughters, Sharon would still have her dream. She wanted to feel good about herself. She wanted a fancy new custom house.

If Weston, Colorado, wasn’t so isolated, no cartographer would bother inking it on any map. But as luck would have it, the village located thirty miles of scenic roadway from Trinidad was always the perfect dot on the map. Nothing around it but a long, lonely, winding stretch of road. Snowcapped mountains brushed against the horizon where asphalt sliced through rocky outcroppings along the highway as it drops down the canyon where the little town was bunched up. A small green-and-white sign advises travelers not to blink: WELCOME TO WESTON.

The town’s most well-known business was Weston Supply, a general store that had been the purveyor of miners’ goods and supplies for more than a century. Locals who need something, and don’t want to make the drive into Trinidad to get it, can usually find what they are looking for at the store/post office.

Wet Canyon was a deep chasm, cut by the Purgatoire River over a millennium of pelting rains and avalanches of snow. It was rugged and breathtaking. Sharon had fallen in love with thirty-five acres above the canyon. The views were stunning: twenty miles away Chuchara Pass could be seen, as could the snowy beauty of the Spanish Peaks. On a clear day, Mt. Baldy in New Mexico fractured the horizon with its stately, though simple, form. Sharon told Perry that they would build a magnificent home, the finest in the county, right there on a tree-studded spot along Cougar Ridge. Perry, as always, agreed.

For the dawn of a new decade, the mountains would be a good place to live. Sharon cajoled and begged. She used everything in her considerable arsenal of feminine skills. In 1980, the family had grown to include an infant daughter Sharon named Misty.

The mountains would be the perfect place to raise the perfect family.

The 1980s had begun with a land rush. It seemed more people were moving into Wet Canyon as the decade started than in the twenty years prior. While it was true the region was still sparsely populated, more folks were showing up. For old-timers there were new neighbors; for the new people there was an unspoiled beauty that they hoped their numbers wouldn’t eradicate. Ray and Candis Thornton were among the newcomers to the Canyon. By late spring of 1980, the real-estate developer and his kindergarten-teacher wife, were living in a log cabin, staking out a meadow that would be the site of their new ranch home.

One afternoon a Champion motor home pulled off to the side of the road. Both Ray, 38, and Candis, 35, had seen the rig before. The owners had bought a sizable tract of land not far from their place.

The wife carried an infant daughter while a little boy shadowed his father into the grassy expanse of the field. They introduced themselves as the Nelsons. They were living in the motor home until their house was completed.

“I instantly liked Dr. Nelson,” Ray later said. “But I didn’t like her. She was wearing extremely short shorts. She seemed loud, a little mouthy as she talked about her plans for her house.”

As the time passed and Ray and Candis Thornton got to know their neighbors better, they marveled over what it had been that brought the two of them together.

“Dr. Nelson was a real likable guy,” Ray said. “We often wondered how he could get involved with someone like Sherry. Their personalities were so different. Perry Nelson was a real professional type person. She was not. Not at all.”

The Weston store owner was another who would never forget Sharon Nelson during those early days. She was a friendly woman with a comment for everyone. Whenever she came in with her husband, she made sure everyone knew how much in love they were.

“Whenever I saw them they were lovey-dovey,” the store owner recalled. “She was hugging him and kissing him. That was Sharon.”

For some, an inspiration for a dream house is torn from the glossy pages of shelter magazines or culled from the cherished memories of their travels. That’s how Tudor homes get built in Boise and how adobe-style homes find their way to Virginia. More bad ideas are built from dreams than good ones. Sharon Nelson had tired of living in the little houses built by someone else; she wanted her own place. She wanted it to be big, grandiose, one of a kind.

Just like she saw herself.

The focal point was a six-sided great room that soared to a cathedral ceiling; a freestanding, double-flue fireplace would be put in place to provide warmth and ambiance. A wraparound deck, eight feet wide by 120 feet long, would provide all the outdoor living space anyone could ever desire. The master bedroom, also with a cathedral ceiling and outside entrance, was enormous at sixteen feet by twenty-eight feet. If the kitchen and the children’s bedrooms were less grand and seemed almost incidental, the house only reflected the priorities of its designer. This was a love nest and a place to show the world what she had. The fact water had to be hauled from a neighbor’s well only confirmed it. Who needs water when you have love?

Sharon even gave the place a name. And why not? Tara, the Biltmore, San Simeon… all were homes so distinctive, so important that they had been dubbed with a nickname. Sharon called her creation Round House.

Some considered the house “Doctor’s Folly,” built in a place without running water and phone lines for a woman few trusted. Others reflected on the woman who had been replaced.

Blanche Wheeler for one felt a twinge of sorrow for Julie Nelson. The house her ex-husband had been building for his home-wrecker of a new wife was, by all indications, a showplace.

“Poor Julie,” she told her husband Karl one evening. “She waited five years to get her kitchen remodeled and Sherry gets everything she wants all at once.”

The Robinson name was synonymous with Wet Canyon and had been for generations. Albert Robinson was the third generation of his clan to run the sawmill four miles up the canyon. Al and his wife, Melanie, made their home in a red-brick home—added on to as children were born—next to the mill. Tiny frame houses dot the edge of the right-of-way across from the tidy homes of millworkers.

In his sixties, Al was as tall, lanky and determined as he had been in his youth. He was the type of man who refused to ask his workers to do something he wouldn’t do himself. Melanie Robinson ran their home with military precision. The cupboards were always stocked. Melanie didn’t want Al to make the drive to Trinidad in snowy conditions because she had let the larder run low.

Al didn’t like Sharon Nelson, from the first time he laid his eyes upon her.

Perry and Sharon had stopped by the Robinson place to talk about supplies for their new house. Perry had been driving; Sharon was asleep in one of the bunks of the motor home.

Just as Perry reached out to shake Al’s hands, a loud voice came from the motor home. It was Sharon.

“You son of a bitch!” she yelled. “You let those damn flies in there and woke me up!”

“I didn’t mean to,” Perry said, obviously embarrassed by the outburst.

Al Robinson said nothing, but he knew right then and there that he didn’t care much for Sher Nelson, his new neighbor.

Many years later, the old man remembered how he felt about his first encounter with Sharon.

“Here was this guy—a helluva nice man—busting his butt to build this woman an expensive home in the mountains, and she was treating him like that.”

The passage of time did little to lessen Ray Thornton’s distaste for Sharon Nelson. When Sharon invited the Thornton’s for dinner, Ray balked. He couldn’t stomach the idea of mealtime with that sleazy woman. Candis, on the other hand, wanted to go.

“But you’ll be able to talk with Perry. You like Perry,’ she said, reminding Ray invitations don’t come every day in the mountains. There were few neighbors, and many of those were hermit-types.

Ray finally agreed.

“Guess we better go,” he said.

Candis was awestruck by the spread Sharon set out on her beautiful dining table. Linens, crystal, china; it was as beautiful as anything Candis had seen in one of those women’s magazines that tell ladies that they can do it, too! The meal itself was superb. Sharon was a fantastic cook, even Ray had to admit that.

Sharon told the Thorntons about how pleased they were with Weston, how they had come to the mountains to start over.

“This is a new beginning for us,” she said.

As the meal was finished, little Danny Nelson emerged from the back bedroom carrying a photograph.

The boy, almost three, chattered excitedly as he brought the photograph to Candis.

“This is when I got borned,” he said.

Candis looked down and froze her facial muscles in what she hoped was not too alarming a manner. It was photo of Sharon, legs spread wide, pushing her son from her womb. The image startled Candis. It wasn’t that she didn’t think the birth process wasn’t beautiful; it was just such an explicit picture of her hostess. She thought the photo should be a private, family memento.

“Very nice, honey,” she said.

After dinner, the Thorntons left with an eyeful. The doctor and his wife were a couple of those liberal types that probably fit in better in the city than out there in Weston.

In time, everyone would see those photos. Sharon, it seemed, was proud of her body. She never let an opportunity pass in which she didn’t comment on it When friends from out of town came, Sharon showed the photos Perry had taken of her when she was pregnant. The shots showed her as she stood in the doorway, her belly enormous, her breasts full as honeydew melons.

Another time, when the subject of a doctor’s visit came up, Sharon again turned the subject into a self-compliment on her fantastic body.

“I disrobed and the doctor took one look at me and said, ‘Why, Sharon, you don’t have a tan line!’

“‘No, doctor, I sunbathe in the nude.’”

“‘Just beautiful,’ he says.”

Sharon was the kind of woman who could say anything. At times, it seemed as though she lacked the ability to censor herself. Even with her husband in the next room, she’d go on about local men she found particularly attractive. Men she thought might make good lovers.

She wasn’t too off-color. She wasn’t too descriptive. But there was no doubt she was interested.

She said of one neighbor that “he could eat crackers and put his boots under my bed anytime.”

Another time, word got around the canyon that Perry and Sharon had another couple over and played strip poker. By the end of the night, no one had on a stitch.

And if something happened, Sharon never said one way or another. She’d simply laugh it off… and make folks think that something did.

Even though she had begun to see her husband’s point of view when it came to Sharon Nelson, Candis Thornton continued to enjoy a casual friendship with the neighbor from the mountaintop. Yet the more she got to know her, the more she found disconcerting. Sharon seemed to have no shame, no understanding of propriety.

While the two women visited over iced tea at Candis’ place Sharon told her the story of how she snagged Perry.