Sex. Murder. Mystery. (18 page)

Maybe it was right then and there. Maybe it was later. Neither could be sure. But no doubt about it, there was a little bit of magic there. Little bit of fire.

Chapter 12

THE HANDWRITING HAD BEEN ON THE WALL SINCE the day Sharon-the-preacher’s-wife sashayed into the optometry office and set her sights on bewitching the member of the Adventist congregation with the most money. Barb Ruscetti had hoped Perry’s separation from his social-climber wife had meant she also would be free of Sharon. But when the Nelsons patched things up, Barb knew her days at the office were numbered. Sharon wasn’t the type that would share her man—or his office. Sharon had made it clear time and again that the business could not support two optical assistants. One of them would have to go.

So though it still broke Barb’s heart, it was no real surprise when she was laid off the end of June 1982.

Perry left her a note with her final check:

“Barb, you know I wouldn’t do this to you for nothing in all the world. You know I don’t have much of a say-so in this anymore.’”

After seventeen years working for Perry Nelson, Barb Ruscetti held no doubts that she was about to face a challenge that would test her. She was glad unemployment insurance would help her through the rough spots until she found a new job. A month after she made her application, however, she received a letter indicating that she was ineligible for benefits. Unemployment taxes, the letter indicated, had not been paid by her employer for more than a year.

Barb Was still fuming when she found Perry in his office.

“Tell me something,” she said, waving the letter in his face. “Why haven’t you paid into my unemployment for me?”

Perry was startled. “Barb, I have,” he said.

“You’re a damn liar! If you did, why did I get this letter?”

He studied the page and shook his head. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Barb challenged him to call the unemployment office to get it straightened out and Perry immediately went for the phone.

“Hey!” A voice cut through the office.

“What the hell is going on here?” The voice belonged to Sharon.

Perry put the receiver down and Barb spun around to answer.

“Nobody’s paid into my unemployment! You took it out of my check, but you didn’t pay it.”

Sharon stiffened. “That’s a lie!”

“You mean the unemployment office is telling us we’re liars? That you did pay it?”

“Yes, I did!’”

Perry dialed the unemployment number again and spoke with someone for a few minutes about the letter, about the funds. Embarrassment replaced his outrage. Barb Ruscetti’s unemployment tax had not, in fact, been paid for thirteen months.

He gently set down the phone and turned to Sharon.

“Haven’t you been paying into her fund?”

Sharon shrugged. She had been caught and she knew it.

“Why should I?” she retorted.

Barb felt herself lunging. She wanted to slap the smug look off her mouth. Instead, she pulled herself together and made her way toward the door.

“You bitch,” she called out, hating that she had been provoked to use such language. Sharon always brought out the worst in her. She brought out the worst in everyone.

Perry ran after Barb, telling her how sorry he was for what his wife had done. He had never meant for things to turn out that way. Barb, as angry as she had ever been in all her life, let her good sense take control once more. As she put the useless letter back into her purse, she shook her head and let out a deep sigh.

She knew the answer before she even asked the question: “Oh, Doctor, what did you get yourself into?” Barb knew the answer was the she-devil in a tube top with an attitude that the world was hers for the picking sitting back in the doctor’s office, scratching her claws on a tabletop as she ranted about Barb Ruscetti as if Barb had been the one who’d done something wrong.

“Yeah, I know,” was all the man could say. “I know.”

It had been Sharon’s idea. She had wanted to preside over a party in her beautiful new home for months. She had wanted to show the locals that despite all that had been said about her, they would love her. They had to love her. She invited about twenty friends and neighbors to a Halloween costume party. Perry was a guru in a long robe. Sharon wore a long ecru dress and a big, wide-brimmed hat that made her look like some kind of Scarlett O’Hara of the Rockies. Her accent dripped southern hospitality. She even hired Sam Bachicha, a local legend of a one-man band, to perform for the evening.

Sharon set out a beautifully frosted cake, decorated with the words Play it Again, Sam.

And while neighbors and friends gathered to dance under the high ceiling of Round House’s living room, the hostess had her eyes on the man she had wanted from nearly the first day she saw him at her front door asking to borrow the wheelbarrow. His blue eyes called to her.

Gary Adams was the man of the hour. A man, Sharon told herself, whose time had come. Gary dressed as a mountain man, in a fringed leather shirt, leather pants, hat and a fake beard. He chatted with Perry for a while as Sharon played hostess with the mostest. A few rum and Cokes later, Sharon “borrowed” Gary from his wife, Nancy, and asked him to dance.

“Oooh,” she said, her breath warm against his ear and neck, “I love the smell of leather.” As the music played, as it became more apparent that no one was paying much attention to them, Sharon pressed her breasts against Gary’s chest.

“Why don’t you come in the office on Thursday and get an eye exam and we’ll get to know each other a little better?” she asked, her words slipping deeper into a sexy, southern accent.

Gary Adams knew Thursdays were days when Sharon left her husband at Round House with their son and daughter while she presumably did some office work. No eye exams were given on Thursdays. Even so, Gary planned to go. He was intrigued.

“At first [her advances] kind of embarrassed me. My wife’s right there. My wife’s dancing with a friend. They’re dancing one way and Sharon and I are dancing very close. I thought maybe it was just the liquor. She’d been drinking. I’d been drinking some, too,” he told a friend.

The Robinsons and the Parsons were among the group at the Halloween party. None of them would leave with any indication that there had been any romantic sparks between Sharon and Gary. Maybe it was that Sharon was discreet? Maybe it was that everyone was having too good a time to notice?

Dr. Nelson was among those who paid no mind to his wife’s attentions toward the leather-clad guest. As smart as he was, when it came to his wife the eye doctor was blind. Especially when it came to other men. Men liked the doctor’s wife and she knew it.

“I think she intimidated a lot of people, especially women. She was gorgeous. She could get a man. Just walking into a room men were attracted to her. They were intrigued… the way she carried herself. The way she walked…” one of Sharon’s admirers later recalled.

The following Thursday, Gary Adams found Sharon sitting at her desk in tight black pants and an orange, red and white long-sleeved sweater. Her outfit covered her form without leaving anything to the imagination. She looked good. Gary smiled and said hi.

“Hello,” Sharon said, looking up with a warm smile. “How you doing?”

Before he could give much of an answer, Sharon invited him to come into a back office where they could talk and “get to know each other.”

Sharon closed the door and moved close.

Long after it happened, the memory of the encounter brought a smile to Gary Adams. He’d never forget what happened and how surprised he was that it had.

“I thought she was going to give me a big hug and she gave me a kiss and that’s when she started really rubbing her crotch on my leg. At first her arms were around my back, and then she went down to my butt and just pulled me in tighter to her.”

After a few minutes of fooling around, a patient who needed to check on eyeglasses for his wife brought an abrupt halt to the pair’s passion. Sharon left for the front office to talk to the patient. In a few minutes, she returned.

“Why don’t you go get a motel room?” she said.

Gary called from the Trinidad Best Western around five o’clock and gave the doctor’s wife the room number. A bit annoyed, she told him that next time he should rent a room on the other side of the motel.

“Someone might see my car,” she said, the voice of experience.

A few minutes later, Sharon was surprisingly talky and nervous as she tried to get comfortable in the motel room. She had been so hot-to-trot back at the doctor’s office that if he had put as much effort into it as she had, they would have had sex right then and there. At the motel she looked around as if she was worried someone might see her or that Perry would find out from his friend and handy neighbor—Gary Starr Adams.

“Do you have some protection?” she asked.

Gary told her that he had a vasectomy. Sharon thought for a moment and frowned.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I got pregnant from Buzz and he said he had had a vasectomy.”

When Sharon emerged she wore nothing but a black bra and black panties. Her tan was all over. No lines. No imperfections. As far as Gary Adams could see, she was a Playboy centerfold minus the staple. The woman was a knockout.

Yet something was wrong. Under the covers, no matter how beautiful she was, nothing was happening. Gary’s penis was a limp noodle and no amount of stimulation from Sharon could make it stand to attention. God, the woman tried. God, she gave it her all. But nothing. Zip. Gary grew more anxious. Impotence had never been a problem before. Never in his entire adult life.

“She was trying to get me aroused,” he recalled later, ”I just couldn’t do it. Right then, it should have been a warning… saying my body knows more than my brain. It is not right.”

The two hugged and kissed for a while under the sheets, but it was useless. Gary said how sorry, how embarrassed he was. Sharon was nice about it. She said it didn’t matter.

She even asked to see him again.

Whether he knew it at that moment or weeks later, Gary Adams could never be sure. But after that first afternoon with Sharon Nelson in the motel room, he was hooked. He was hers.

“Let me think on it,” he said.

When it came to roofing or carpentry, everyone in Wet Canyon knew that Gary Adams was an expert. He was fast, dependable and affordable, and most everyone in the community had used his services, or knew that if they needed something done, he was a good man to call.

Whenever Ray Thornton looked out at the road and saw Gary Adams drive his little blue import pickup up the hill to the Nelsons’ house, he figured the friendly carpenter was doing some work for the doctor and his wife. When the trips became more frequent—almost daily—Ray began to wonder. Perry was never home when Gary drove up to the house on Cougar Ridge.

After a while, it became obvious something was going on, though it brought little comment.

“We minded our own business and didn’t get involved,” Ray later said.

Poor Perry. The price of being the talk of the town continued to be higher than the optometrist had likely considered when he decided his lust for the minister’s wife should not be bridled. As word continued to ricochet from Trinidad to Rocky Ford and back that the eye doctor had stolen the preacher’s wife, even the most loyal remainder of Perry Nelson’s longtime customers drifted away, canceling appointments and never calling back. Sometimes the excuses were lame, but more often than not, patients were disarmingly direct. Perry begged many to reconsider, but time and time again, patients who had once been delighted by Dr. Nelson’s jokes and friendly ways would be charmed no longer.

“You don’t steal a minister’s wife and do business as usual in Trinidad.”

Even when Perry went into a restaurant or made a visit to the store, formerly friendly folks were cool. He’d go out of his way to strike up a conversation, but many chose to turn a deaf ear.

While Perry struggled to save his professional life, his wife continued to sleep with the carpenter from the bottom of the canyon. The first few times, sleep and cuddling was all they really could do. Gary Adams still couldn’t maintain an erection.

He went to the office one Thursday, not really sure why he was trying so hard to consummate an affair when, at least physically, it wasn’t working right.

“I’d like to be with you,” he said one day, “but I don’t have any money.”

“That’s okay,” Sharon replied, getting her purse and fishing through it for some bills. “You paid last time.”

“I don’t feel right about taking your money.”

She handed him thirty dollars. “That’s fine.”

But again, under the sheets of a motel bed, nothing worked.

Sharon didn’t act as though she minded much. She nuzzled with Gary and tried like an Olympian to get him aroused.

“Perry doesn’t hug me or kiss me like you do. We don’t have sex.”

* * *

Gary Adams lost his wet noodle on a plateau above Trinidad Lake one unseasonably warm afternoon in the spring of 1983. Finally. After several attempts at intercourse with the beguiling woman of his dreams, Sharon’s mountain man finally rose to the occasion. The two had spread out an Indian blanket out of view, in the midst of some of the country’s most spectacular scenery, and closed their eyes to make love. They came to the lake for that singular purpose. They came for a singular reason: there were no motel fees to be paid; they could have sex for free. And it worked.

Sort of.

“I didn’t please you,” Gary said, rolling off of her. Even though he had finally maintained an erection, he felt like a failure. Gary was certain Sharon had not experienced an orgasm. She had not moaned, groaned or writhed in the kind of ecstasy that he had hoped she would when his mission was finally accomplished.

“Oh yes, you did,” Sharon said. “Just hold me. Perry doesn’t even touch me anymore.”

Gary put his arms around her, and despite the fact he had done his best, he felt utter shame. He had cheated on his wife only once before. He had been a virgin when he married Nancy. He had wanted the kind of sex he had seen in pornographic movies. He’d wanted it so badly that when it finally came, and Sharon hadn’t, it hurt his pride. It made him want her more.