Sex. Murder. Mystery. (24 page)

When Mrs. Nelson wrote Sharon with the happy news that they were coming to Colorado for a visit, Sharon's response seemed peculiar. She phoned back, and acted as if she was glad they were coming, but told them she had other plans and could not break them. She reluctantly told her in-laws they could come, but only stay for a single night.

“Then you’ll have to leave the next day,” she said.

The Nelsons canceled the trip. What choice did they have? They weren’t going to make the long drive from Michigan for a one-day visit. Their hearts ached for young Danny and Misty; they couldn’t see the sense in it. Yet it nagged at them: Why didn’t Sharon want them around?

A grief-stricken mind is a great and terrible trickster. The days, weeks, months after her father's disappearance was the most difficult time of Lorri Nelson Hustwaite's life. Crying jags lasted for days. Meals were skipped. Rumors coming from Colorado to Montana only added to her misery, it also added to her hope.

Whenever the phone would ring, Lorri would reach for it with the hope that it was her dad calling. She’d even imagine the words he would use:

“Sorry, Lorelco, for causing you so much worry, but I'm all right.”

When she’d pick up the receiver, Lorri could feel her heart stop for a second, only to start up again when it was instantly evident the caller was not her father. Sometimes her voice would catch just a little, perhaps signaling to the caller the young woman on the other end of the line was in some kind of trouble.

“I'm fine,” she’d say.

At the grocery store, Lorri would see a man who resembled her father. Driving by a service station she’d crane her neck to watch a man as he pumped gas. It was him! She’d be certain, just for an instant, that her father was there. Then the disappointment would take over. And even though it was never Perry Nelson, even though no body had been found, she held out hope that he’d be alive.

“I wish my dad would send a postcard or call,” she said to her husband for the umpteenth time. Darrell Hustwaite had grown weary of that particular broken record. It wasn’t that the kind-hearted mechanic didn’t respect his wife's terrible grief; it was that he saw the futility in it.

“Gee, Lorri! This is killing you. You’ve got to get over it.”

But she couldn’t. She seemed unable to set it aside. When word came from friends in Colorado that talk about her father had shifted to the idea that he had fled the country to Australia and was never coming back, Lorri was relieved.

At least he isn’t dead
, she thought.

Lorri confided to friends how she felt when she heard her dad might have left the country to escape Sharon and the IRS.

“If he's alive and safe, it's okay. Things must have been horrible at home. Maybe the only way he could get away from Sharon was to disappear?”

One afternoon a few weeks after Perry disappeared, neighbors and real estate agents Ann and Bernard Parsons drove up to go over some business matters Sharon had asked about. They noticed Danny Nelson playing in a sandbox in front of Round House.

As Ann walked to the front door, Bernard called out to the little boy.

“Is your mother home?”

“Mom's in the house. Dad's in the river!” the boy called out.

Bernard chuckled at the peculiar response.

“What did he say?” Ann asked as she walked up the steps to the front door.

“Tell you later.”

When they got back in the car after talking with Sharon, Bernard repeated Danny's words.

“Mom's in the house! Dad's in the river!”

Chapter 17

WHEN HE TOLD SHARON THE STORY OF HOW HE killed her husband, Gary sometimes altered the tale. Sometimes he said he wasn’t sure if it had worked. Other times he embellished the saga. Sharon would later say she didn’t know what to believe. She didn’t know what really happened. But Gary, in fact, did know.

He told her about the drive up to Denver to get the guns, how Perry had chatted along the way, not knowing what was about to happen….

Gary asked Perry to stop for a beer, though that wasn’t the real reason for the delay. As the two shared a beer in a tavern in Castle Rock, Gary excused himself to use the bathroom. With Perry sitting behind half-empty beer glasses, Gary Adams made his way to a pay phone and dialed the number of a buddy with whom he had briefly lived near Denver.

“Pick me up at midnight at the first tunnel past Golden,” he said.

The friend agreed.

The beer-buzzed doctor and the carpenter drank a while longer, then left to get some shut-eye before driving back to Wet Canyon in the morning.

It was around midnight. The road was slicker than still-warm roadkill. The rain had been relentless, drumming the windows of the old VW with pellets hard enough to make one flinch. Perry hated driving in the rain. Any other kind of weather condition was easier, even snow. Unless it was a whiteout, at least the driver could see at night during a snowfall. Gary looked straight ahead at the roadway, his nervousness not overwhelming enough to stop him from what he had planned to do.

Perry pulled into a parking strip next to Clear Creek to get some sleep. Gary swung the door open and got out.

“Gotta take a leak,” he said.

Perry nodded and went to work on reclining the car seats so the two could stretch out and snooze until morning light.

Gary didn’t have a tire iron this time, so he went down to the water's edge to look for a rock that would do the job. It was dark and every stone seemed too large.

Finally, he found one he could lift. He memorized where it was and he returned to the VW.

“Perry,” he said, “I lost my wallet down there. Can you give me a hand looking for it?”

Perry nodded before picking up a flashlight and following Gary down to the surging banks of Clear Creek. Some creek— the water from the storm had swollen it to a raging river. The beam of the flashlight stretched a white line through the night air as it slid across the wet boulders flanking the immediate creek side.

“Can’t see anything,” Perry said, his head bent low as he searched the area.

Gary hoisted a large rock of fifteen to twenty pounds and slammed it hard against Perry's slightly balding head. He would later admit he had used all his might to do so. He had no clue that the human skull was so resilient.

Perry fell to his hands and knees into the icy water. In a second, blood and water running down his face and into his beard, he jumped back up. Gary couldn’t believe his eyes.

Why wasn’t he knocked out? The icy water? The adrenaline pumping through his terrified body? Why wasn’t he out cold?

Gary pushed Perry back down and tried to hold his head under the water. The two men thrashed, Gary trying his damnedest to keep the upper hand. Yet Perry was holding his own. He was much taller. He weighed more. And by then he must have known he was fighting for his life.

Gary put all his weight on top of his flailing friend and held him under the water. But again, just as he thought he’d completed what he set out to do, Gary was stunned by Perry Nelson's strength. He rose out of the water once more.

“Like a freakin’” horror movie.

At one point, Gary slipped under the frigid, waist-high water. The water's sudden depth scared him. The fighting had taken the two men further from the shore. And all of a sudden, as if it was meant to be, the current swept Perry Nelson away. Gary watched as the man he had called his friend, the man whose wife he had been screwing for months, floated down Clear Creek.

He was gone.

Gary, scraped and covered in sand, mud and blood, got behind the wheel of the VW and drove it a half mile away. When he hit about 20 mph, he swung the door open and rolled out. The car slipped into the creek, its headlights still on.

The goddamn thing's floating!

Volkswagens are watertight. Everyone knows that. Gary knew it. What was he thinking? Dr. Nelson's car had become a beacon. His heart raced as he watched the VW bob along the current of the creek. If a. car came by the driver would surely see it. He held his heaving breath and waited. In a couple of minutes, relief came. The creek twisted and the car disappeared around a sharp bend.

It had not gone exactly according to plan.

“The plan was in my head: Knock Perry unconscious, hold him underwater so he’d drown, drag him up the bank, put him in the VW, then drive him in.”

He couldn’t be sure if he had done the job. There was the slim possibility Dr. Nelson had made it to shore and was still alive. Gary walked along the shore searching without the aid of a flashlight, hoping that he had killed his friend.

Hoping, above all, he would not disappoint Sharon.

With Sharon and Gary entwined like a vitrine of snakes, it didn’t take long for people to wonder out loud. Wet Canyon neighbors Ray and Candis Thornton were among those who could not hold suspicions inside any longer. What was happening up in Round House wasn’t right. A man disappears and his wife has a lover move in right away? Something was going on. Something ugly.

When the Thorntons ran into a couple friendly with Gary Adams, they finally said they thought Sharon and Gary had conspired to kill Perry.

“No,” the friend said. “It couldn’t be. Gary was in church the day after Perry was missing. He had his Bible with him and he was praying.”

Kindergarten teacher Candis discounted the image. She didn’t trust Gary Adams. Going to church was a ruse.

“He's like a wild man. He’d steal from you… and look you in the face and tell you how much he loved you. I’ve never seen anything like him. He has the most piercing blue eyes, so unbelievably evil.”

Husband Ray agreed. “His eyes are like two blue ice cubes. They are coldest blue I have ever seen.”

The eyes of a killer
, he thought.

The woman in the sling-backs was also poison. Even Candis Thornton finally had to admit it. Yet she was torn. She still wanted to like Sharon Nelson. Candis was the kind of woman who wanted to see the good in people. There was enough ugly stuff in the world as it was.

If Sharon had kept her questionable escapades within the confines of Round House, that would be one thing. But over the course of her years in the Canyon, Sharon had proven she had no boundaries. A pattern had emerged. Dr. Nelson's wife was expert at befriending a couple, ingratiating herself and charming her new friends with stunning fluency.

Then, when the wife was sucked into a one-sided friendship, Sharon would have sex with the woman's husband.

“I know she's doing this beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Candis told a friend, reliving the life and times of Sharon Nelson. “I saw it happen two times. I just can’t believe how the woman is acting.”

At least, Candis could count her blessings. Her husband, Ray, had despised Sharon from day one.

Barbara Ruscetti met Nancy Adams at a Weight Watchers meeting and liked her very much. When she heard about Sharon and Gary messing around, Barbara felt a surge of sympathy for Nancy. Her husband was just another notch on Sharon Nelson's bedpost.

Barb would never forget a story she heard about the goings-on in Wet Canyon. It seemed Nancy wasn’t as much of a pushover as her reputation had it.

“The mailman was a good friend of mine and he said Danny had taken the mail out of the Adams’ box and put it into another mailbox and Mrs. Adams got very upset. So she went up to Sharon's house and told Sharon that if she didn’t keep her goddamn brat away from her mailbox that they were going to have him arrested. So Sharon and Gary's wife had a great big fight. And I understand it was a knock-down-drag-out. And supposedly, Gary went up to Sharon and told her not to ever touch his wife again. They supposedly were sweethearts! He was supposed to be living with her! But then the first move she made on Gary's wife, Gary was defending the wife, not Sharon.”

Another time there were more fireworks between Gary's women. Bolstered by her husband's promises, Nancy felt it was she that would stay Mrs. Adams.

Sharon was sure she was the one.

Nancy Adams fixed her eyes with the kind of steely stare the Other Woman dreads. Without a single word uttered, there would be no mistaking that she was about to tell Sharon to back off and keep away from her man.

The man is mine. He shares my bed, not yours. Keep your mitts to yourself, you bitch. You home-wrecking whore.

It was that kind of look.

“Stay away from Gary,” she said. “Don’t drop notes in the mailbox. Don’t do anything.”

Sharon didn’t say a word. She simply turned and walked away.

Living a life between two women had become routine for Gary Adams. Whenever he had the chance, he’d make up an excuse to leave the Dude Ranch and head up the ridge to Sharon's place. Nancy knew what was going on, but she couldn’t stop her husband. And while the draw had been the sex, Gary knew in time there would be money. Lots of it. As the days went on and her husband went out to visit or go to town, Nancy Adams was left alone to smolder. She was fed up.

When Gary told Nancy it was best for her to take their son and get a job in Denver, she gladly complied.

Though he had sought the separation, Gary, however, remained agitated. His nerves were shot like a rural road sign. He was falling apart and he knew it. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife and son; he needed Sharon more. Sharon was everything.

Nancy packed up, drove away from Wet Canyon and moved in with her mother. She was justifiably heartbroken over her husband's relationship with Sharon, but she didn’t want to give up so easily. The small woman with the big eyes had a history with Gary that went back to her teenage years. He was her one and only. She lost her virginity to the man, and there had been no others. In love as she was, Nancy was not a complete dummy. A few weeks after she left for Denver, Nancy decided to return to the Dude Ranch. She found out her husband and Sharon Nelson were living together, carrying on like lovesick teenagers. Everyone in town knew it, too.

This time Nancy stood up for herself. Damn the ties. Damn the years they had spent, the family they had been once. She told her blue-eyed honey that she was leaving him. She was filing for divorce in Denver. She wasn’t going to play the fool to Sharon Lynn Nelson.