Sex. Murder. Mystery. (16 page)

Like a skewered water balloon, tears flooded down her face.

She kept her head down, her hands clutching a tissue to her eyes. And she sobbed and sobbed, muttering something about knowing what happened and how she had not been a part of any of it. She had been a victim, too.

“What can you tell us, Sharon?” Tygart asked.

She didn’t respond. Glen Trainor continued to push, telling her that it was time for her to get on with her life.

“Were the kids getting in the way?”

Sharon didn’t answer, so Tygart asked once more. “In your relationship with Glen?”

Finally, Sharon said no. She said she and Glen were happy. His mother, his coworkers could vouch for that.

Det. Trainor pushed once more. “Look, Sharon, I’ve been looking at you and you’ve been doing this for a real long time and you’re a troubled woman.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re absolutely about to fall apart at the seams and I know why. What happened up there wasn’t supposed to happen that way. And I don’t know what happened, okay? And that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“It’s not gonna go away. It’s not gonna change, only for the worst.”

“Sharon, tell us what you know. Look, it’s obvious you’re scared of something. We’ll protect you. We’ll put you in a hotel room and guard you if necessary. Tell us what you know.”

She regained her faltering composure and nodded.

”I will, but not here. These walls have ears.”

“Then we’ll go.”

“I want my kids.”

“We’ll go get them from your daughter’s place.”

No one said another word. Not to the sheriff’s department or to each other. They simply picked up their belongings and left. Glen Trainor had it in his mind that by acquiescing to her requests, they’d be able to maintain her trust and learn whatever it was that she was holding inside. Beyond picking up Danny and Misty, the Thornton detectives knew nothing about what they would do next or where they would take Sharon, the lady of the canyon with two dead husbands.

Once again, Glen Trainor and Elaine Tygart were driving

Around Trinidad with no idea where they were going. After the cops stopped to pick up her squirming kids, Danny and Misty, Sharon instructed them to get on the highway and drive.

No one said much. Sharon and her children huddled in the backseat, making small talk and chatting about nothing of consequence. The detective drove north on 1-25. And they drove. Every once in a while, the two partners exchanged looks. Again, the reputation of Trinidad had reared its questionable head.

Where are we going? Is this a setup?
Trainor thought.

Both officers had their guns out and on their laps, just in case Sharon was leading them into an ambush. Her remarks at the sheriff s department had somewhat perplexed and slightly worried them. Why had she said the walls had ears? Did she mean that local cops were somehow involved in the murder of Glen Harrelson?

But why?

“What’s going on, Mom?” Danny asked, interrupting the steady silence of the drive.

Sharon gently parted her son’s blond head and forced a smile.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

Glen Trainor wasn’t impatient, but he didn’t like the idea that they were all out on a Sunday Drive. It would, he thought, be nice to know where they were going. Finally, he met Sharon’s eyes in the rearview mirror and asked.

“Are we just going to drive to Denver or are you going to want to stop? We can drive to Denver, if that’s what you need to make you feel safe.”

Sharon shook her head. That wasn’t what she had in mind. She suggested they continue a bit further north to little Walsenburg, Colorado.

“I know of a Pizza Hut where we can talk privately,” she said.

Pizza Hut. The venue seemed ideal. What could be more cozy and safe than a pizza restaurant? It was the ideal locale for Sharon Harrelson to spill the rest of her story. It was the place she wanted to go to sort out what had happened and how none of it was her fault. Not really.

The cops drove on.

Chapter 11

FOR ALL SHE HAD BEEN THROUGH, SHARON Nelson stayed steadfast in one regard: She didn’t give a hoot what anyone thought or said about her. Everything was someone else’s problem. So what? None of their beeswax. She left the minister. She dumped the doctor. BFD. She could have slept with half the high school football team and not batted an eye. But she didn’t do that. Instead, as her marriage to Perry crumbled, Sharon took up with a man named Buzz Reynolds and moved into his house on a gorgeous spread of Colorado ranch land. So what if she left her husband and shacked up with Buzz? She didn’t care who knew about it. Sharon was living her life as if her actions had no effect on anyone. She was a woman unfettered by convention. She was no longer the Stepford Wife that she had felt was her destiny. She told friends she wanted a divorce. As if to rub salt in Perry Nelson’s considerable and gaping wounds, Sharon had added the betrayal of a decade-old friendship to the mix. Buzz Reynolds, a self-made rancher with vast holdings, was one of Perry Nelson’s best friends. Buzz Reynolds was a friendly man with a kind word for everyone, not a home-wrecker, not a Don Juan. Ten years older than Sharon, Buzz was more pleasant-looking than handsome, and, like Perry Nelson, he was ripe for the picking.

Buzz had money.

Folks around town wondered if Sharon Nelson could have found it within herself to exercise a bit more discretion by dropping her skirt for a man her husband didn’t know so well.

Did the men who fell for Sharon’s charms take stupid pills, or what?

One morning not long after she left Perry and their kids for money and madness with Buzz, Sharon arrived at the Trinidad optometry office to pick up a check for hours she had supposedly worked at the clinic. When she asked to see her estranged husband, Barb told her to wait a minute.

“He’s busy with a patient,” she said.

A little later, the patient gone, Sharon and Perry got into a heated argument over money, their marriage and Sharon’s wandering ways. Barb could hear the two of them scream at each other. She expected everyone else in the building could, too.

A few minutes later, Sharon stomped out of the back office and went over to Barb.

“I’ll tell you what. If that son of a bitch doesn’t give me a divorce, I’ll blow his fucking head off. I’ll kill him.”

Barb tried to calm her by making a joke of the remark.

“Oh yeah?” she kidded. “What would you do with the body?”

Sharon didn’t laugh.

“I’ll stick it in the freezer. Nobody will find him there.”

And so the war went. Sharon would say this. Perry would do that.
Bless his heart
, Barb thought,
the man was no match for his bitch-on-wheels wife
. If they didn’t have the two kids, Dr. Nelson would have been a smart man to just let her go. But, of course, that was not an option. Perry was mad, but against all reason, he was still in love.

One afternoon, Barb rolled her eyes as she handed Dr. Nelson the telephone. It was another Sharon sneak attack. A Trinidad grocer was on the line asking for payment of $150 worth of groceries. Sharon, it seemed, had told the checker to bill her husband, “Dr. Perry Nelson.”

An irritated Perry balked at the charge. He wasn’t going to pay a dime to support Sharon while she flaunted her affair with Buzz. The woman had no scruples whatsoever. Perry had reached his limit. Sharon had traipsed all over town buying things and dropping his name like ticker tape in a parade.

“I’m not sleeping with her. Bill the guy who is,” he said tersely. Though the words were meant to jab, there was something in Perry’s voice that suggested the effort had been wasted. Barb could hear it: Perry still loved Sharon.

The dreaded F-word. Like most everybody else, Barbara Ruscetti had heard the word more often than she cared to. But never in almost two decades of employment had she heard Dr. Nelson utter such coarse vulgarities. When he came in the office swearing a blue streak, peppered with “F this” and “F that,” she stood her ground.

“You don’t use that word around me,” Barb said, feeling glad that despite everything, she could still tell the doc what was on her mind. “Maybe you use it around Sharon, but you don’t use it around me.”

Perry shot her a classic “who me?” look.

His disinterest in her feelings irritated Barb even more.

“Just knock it off,” she said, brushing the wisps of her cinnamon-bun hairdo from her reddened face.

“Don’t get your tits in an uproar,” Perry said, when he finally got the message the woman he had depended on for so many years was not enjoying the new and improved Dr. Nelson.

“I will. You’re not talking to me like that.” Barb shot him an uncharacteristic glare. “I’m not going to stand for it.”

Perry shrugged an apology, but didn’t clean up his act. He had never been a saint, but Sharon’s influence had dragged him down lower than a sewer line. Barb hated what she saw, but there was nothing to do about it. She was torn. She not only loved her job, she needed it. She could only hope that Perry would shape up. She couldn’t quit. Barb Ruscetti was stuck.

“I never heard him say one bad word until Sharon. And then, I mean it was like he was full of the devil,” Barb said, trying to come to terms with her beloved boss’ dark transformation. “He just did a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might say. He turned from good to bad.”

Perry, no longer the occasional-beer Seventh-Day Adventist that he had been when he was with put-upon first wife Julie, took to the bottle as his fortunes and personal life began to snowball into the biggest mess in southern Colorado. Who could blame him? His new wife—the cause of his ruin in the eyes of so many—had left him for his good friend, Buzz Reynolds. Yet many were left to wonder: What had he expected when he married Sharon? Did he really think that she would be true to him? Or he to her, for that matter?

The doctor sought solace from the bottle.

One time Barb pulled Dr. Nelson aside when she detected the boozy odor coating the slurred words of his speech.

“Perry,” she said, calmly masking her horror, but being as direct as she could be, “you can’t come in here like this. Patients won’t like it. They can smell it, too.”

He shrugged and turned away.

As the optometry business continued to fall off, Barb’s paychecks were often delayed. With only the Trinidad office open, Perry had expected patients from Rocky Ford to make the trip to town to see him. They didn’t. One week Barb collected only $14 in receipts. There had been no glasses to dispense. No exams to give. No nothing. People just didn’t want a thing to do with the Nelsons. Sharon once insisted that if Perry’s office offered Visa and MasterCard as a billing option, more customers would come.

But, of course, plastic money made no difference. The problem had never been with Dr. Nelson’s patients and their pocketbooks.

Mixed in with the anger and bitterness, Barb couldn’t help but feel a measure of sorrow for her employer. She frequently overheard Dr. Nelson talking with his banker as he sought to delay loan payments. The figures were staggering to the woman who put her children through school on crocheted booties and a small salary. Dr. Nelson owed $120,000 on the mountain house. The IRS was due more than $100,000; the State of Colorado, $80,000 in back taxes and penalties. Various lens labs around the country were due between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece.

Perry Nelson was in so deep he needed a snorkel to breathe.

One morning, not long before his Bronco was about to be repossessed by the dealership because he could no longer keep up on the payments, the doctor came into the office looking disheveled and wan.

Barb met him at the door. “What’s the matter, Doctor?”

“Oh, Barb,” he said quietly, “I’m going to end it all.”

“You don’t mean that, do you? You remember what my grandmother would say.”

The comment brought a smile to his haggard face. Barb Ruscetti was always talking about the advice her grandmother had doled out.

“What’s that?”

“You die, Perry, you go straight to hell.”

Perry let out a weak laugh. “I’m going there anyway,” he said.

The rest of the morning Barb kept her eye on him. He wasn’t stable and she was worried. At lunch, she closed the office and went to see a friend of Perry’s. She told the man that she thought Perry might be considering suicide. The friend said he’d go see his pal as soon as he finished his work.

“No,” she said somewhat desperately, “you ought to go now.”

The friend found Perry Nelson in his Bronco with a loaded revolver. Tears had striped shiny tracks down his face and his hands trembled.

But he had not pulled the trigger.

“Perry, you gotta hang in there. Things will get better. They really will,” the friend said. ”I promise. Things will get better.”

Though the kind words seemed to calm the eye doctor and avert tragedy, the friend was dead wrong.

Things would never get better.

It was the kind of Christmas surprise no husband wanted. Perry Nelson looked shell-shocked. Sharon had hit him with an announcement that sent him deeper into the bottle. He had invited her up to the mountain house for Christmas with Misty and Danny, some gifts, some dinner, and if he was lucky enough, a chance at a reconciliation. Sharon, however, had another agenda. She told him that she couldn’t come back to him. She was carrying Buzz Reynolds’ baby.

She cried how it was not her fault. Cross her heart and hope to die, it was an accident.

Perry called his estranged wife every name in the book. He told her she was a whore and a slut and if she wanted to have Buzz’s baby so damn bad, she ought to get a divorce and get on with it. If she ever wanted to come back into his life, she’d better get an abortion.

“I’m not raising no one else’s child!” he yelled.

A couple of days later at the office, Dr. Nelson was in another of his fit-to-be-tied moods. He didn’t have a nice word for anyone. He had three pairs of glasses that needed to be repaired, and instead of working on them himself, he threw them in a tangled mass on Barb Ruscetti’s desk. His abruptness startled her. She looked up from her work.

“You send these out to get fixed,” he said loudly.