Sex. Murder. Mystery. (25 page)

Not anymore.

If the men were receptive to her charms, women were decidedly anti-Sharon. It only took a couple of encounters with the brassy beauty to see what she was up to. Some Weston women saw a conniving woman who turned her back on the wives as she played up to their husbands. When Perry was gone and Gary Adams was not around, Sharon would ask for help for jobs which were too tough for her to do.

One neighbor told her husband not to go up to Round House.

“If you do, better not bother coming back,” she said.

When men went up to help Sharon, the standard line batted about was “better watch out, she’ll put some insurance on you and look out!”

When sawmill owner Al Robinson told his wife, Melanie, that he was thinking of going to Sharon's after she said she needed lumber, she had a knee-jerk retort.

“Better not catch you going up there,” Melanie said.

It was only a half-joke, but Al convinced her not to worry.

“This is all business. No hanky-panky,” he said. “I can’t stand the woman.”

Melanie could relax. Al Robinson said it like he meant it.

It figured. As ridiculous and horrendous as it was, it didn’t seem too far off base for Trinidad. Sharon Nelson had probably pulled off the perfect crime. As mechanic Jim Whitley figured it, she had probably eluded arrest by doing what she reportedly did best.

“You had two ways of paying for things in Trinidad: cash or sex. They’ve got their own justice system like nowhere else in the world. I wouldn’t put it past her to have slept with lawyers, judges, whoever down there. She’d use her body any way she needed to. She was just one of those people. She’d be the type to sleep with some guy, then blackmail him about it to get what she really wanted.”

Chapter 18

GOOD GOD. IT WAS NOT ASPEN. IT WAS Trinidad. The fetching woman standing in the checkout line at the Safeway was dressed more appropriately for the glitz of the ski Mecca than tourist destination wannabe Trinidad. Her makeup was flawless, her hair fluffed like a Persian cat combed out with baby powder. And despite her cloud of furs and heels that could trim fat off a roast, Barb Ruscetti knew the woman was Sharon Nelson.

Barb, working at a new job and firmly on her feet again, left her cart and made her way toward her nemesis. She wanted to take the opportunity to inform Sharon that another office assistant from Rocky Ford also had been denied unemployment benefits.

“You didn’t pay her unemployment insurance, either,” Barb said, after barely saying hello.

Sharon shook her head emphatically. With an annoyed look, she pulled her fur coat up on her shoulders.

“That's not true. I paid it. I know I did.”

“I don’t think so,” Barb snapped. The office worker was not a liar, but Sharon was an expert one. While Barb continued to clutch her coupons and grit her teeth, Sharon smiled sweetly and waved good-bye. She said she hoped they’d be able to get together soon.

“I’ve been so busy,” she called out.

Barb Ruscetti had been dismissed. The Queen of the Mountain would have nothing to do with her and, in every way, that was just fine with Barb. Barb couldn’t stand her. The Bitch on Wheels disappeared into the parking lot, leaving a lasting impression that time would never erase.

“She was dressed up to the whattie. I mean she was all spiffy in her fur coat and high heels and her hair was done and the whole bit,” Barb later told a friend.

What was it about women like Sharon? Barb Ruscetti could never quite figure it out. Women like Sharon had everything going for them, youth, beauty and smarts. Yet whatever it was they possessed, it was never enough. The more God and their husbands gave them, the more they wanted. If their perfect nose could be made shorter, it would be done. If they could find a lover with more money or a bigger penis—or whatever it was they wanted—they would search for him. Whatever they desired was whatever they could get their hands on. Barb had lost her husband when she was a young wife. Yet she’d raised her kids on her own, never looking for the man who would sweep her off her feet and end her financial worries. Barb Ruscetti was content with her lot in life, convinced by her own life experiences that the grass was not always greener. She was everything Sharon was not. Moreover, Sharon could never aspire to achieve what Barb had done so successfully on her own.

Whatever Sharon was searching for, Dr. Nelson's former secretary doubted the younger widow would ever find it. Not in North Carolina, not in Colorado. Not anywhere.

Up and down the wobbly little mountain roads to houses clinging like toadstools on hillsides, gas man Louis Volturo was a welcome sight for everyone in Wet Canyon. Everyone, it seemed, but Gary Adams and Sharon Nelson. Holed up once again in their mountaintop love nest, they didn’t seem to take kindly to visitors. In fact, they were downright hostile.

Volturo felt a sharp poke in his ribs as he was filling the Nelsons’ butane tank. It was Gary Adams with a revolver.

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Just putting gas in for Mrs. Nelson,” Volturo said, nervously.

“You put in the gas and get the hell out of this place right now. I don’t want you looking around or anything. Get the hell out of here!”

Later, Louis told his friend Barb Ruscetti about his encounter with the widow Nelson's omnipresent boyfriend.

“I was scared,” he said. “I told my boss that if you want to deliver gas up there, you take it yourself. I won’t take it.”

Barb agreed.

“I wouldn’t go up there, either,” she said.

Sharon's sister Judy had been through the mill when it came to men. She had her abusive marriage and no-good boyfriends. Over time, her sense of smell became acute when it came to men: Judy could smell a rat.

There was something about Gary Adams that gnawed at her sensibilities. He had a kind of innocuous handsome country-boy look, but underneath the aw-shucks facade was something unsettling. She could never put her finger on it. Instead of forcing the issue and analyzing the man, she tried to back off a bit. Gary Adams was a little scary.

One weekend visit at Round House ended abruptly for Judy and her children. Gary was fussing at one of Sharon's children, and Judy jokingly flipped him the bird. In an instant, Gary turned his ire from the child to her.

“This is my house!” he raged. “I’ll do anything and treat anyone any damn way I please. This is my place and no one is going to tell me what to do!”

Judy became frightened. Sharon tried to intervene, albeit halfheartedly. Judy didn’t care what Sharon said. She knew Gary meant every word he was saying. Yet this wasn’t his house. It was Sharon and Perry's house. Judy decided to leave. She was not going to spend one more minute, let alone another night, there. It was the last time she ever visited Sharon at her home in Wet Canyon.

In a way, Judy Douglas needn’t have worried too much about her sister. Sharon's old ways kept her from forging permanent relationships with any man, good or bad. Sharon's backup boyfriend Buzz stayed in the picture whenever Gary Adams was shoved aside. Every couple of weeks, it seemed Sharon would tire of Buzz and return to the mountain house. Back there, she’d summon Gary to her bedroom. Over and over. Back and forth. Sharon was the one holding all the cards; she ruled the world.

Barbara Ruscetti knew the address the instant she pulled the envelope from her thick stack of holiday mail. She knew the handwriting on the envelope belonged to Sharon. It was a greeting card sent by the woman she was certain was behind a terrible murder five months earlier.

Under the cheery holiday salutation was a note: Barb, I miss you very much… could we still be friends? Could I come by and see you?

Even though there were times when she despised Sharon, Barb couldn’t help but be moved by the pathetic little note. She addressed a little card for Sharon and indicated that she would be happy to see her.

Forty-eight hours later, Sharon was in Barb's holiday-decorated and Christmas tree-scented living room, drinking fresh-perked coffee and eating fruitcake. As the buxom widow with the new winter outfit and the cinnamon-twist headed former secretary sat across from each other, there was no denying the tension. Even the muted strains of Christmas carols could do little to mitigate the awkwardness and antagonism.

If Sharon had wanted to be friends, if Barb had thought by inviting her over she was doing the right thing, both were wrong.

Barb had a question that she had wanted to lay on Sharon since that Monday morning when her neighbor had called across the street with the news Dr. Nelson was missing.

“I have something to ask you,” Barb began, her chest heaving slightly with stifled consternation.

Sharon smiled sweetly and looked up from her steaming cup.

“What?” she asked.

Barb let out her breath and blurted the question.

“Did you kill Perry?” she asked.

Sharon set her cup on the table. She turned pale and shook her head with great vehemence. Her fingers brushed her lips.

“No,” she said, “but I sure wish I had.”

Though Sharon punctuated her response with a nervous little laugh, Barb didn’t think it was a joke. Uneasiness hung in the air. Though Sharon chatted a bit more before making up a hasty excuse that she had to leave, the conversation over coffee fruitcake was over.

“She never came back to my house. She knew I knew. When she left, she said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ But she never came back anymore. She’d see me on the street and cross over to the other side. She knew. She was a rotten baby. You can’t believe the things she did.”

The school Christmas play had been a community tradition for as long as many could remember. Everyone in Weston halfway connected with the school attended the event that kicked off the holiday season with the joyous song of Weston's youngest children.

Sharon Nelson entered the school auditorium wrapped in fur and dressed to the nines. Audience members stopped talking and turned to watch her. And watch, they did. She wore heels and a short dress. Her makeup was done to movie-star perfection. For a minute, many stopped breathing.

All knew she had wrangled a portion of some life insurance money before there had been conclusive proof that Perry Nelson was dead. Everyone knew it was blood money that had paid for the sumptuous coat. Everyone knew she was shacked up with Gary Adams. The big question was still bantered about, however: What really happened to Perry?

While most of the women had little regard for Sharon, either because they were jealous or they felt she was a world-class husband hunter, men continued to be divided.

And yet as one local explained to an outsider, when it came to Sharon it seemed men fell into two camps.

“Those who would fall for her and those who were disgusted by her. It was as if their eyes were looking at two different women. A man who could read Sherry was a lucky man. Many were not.”

If Perry was dead, at least Sharon was left with some money. Julie Whitley's memory turned back to three weeks before Perry's car went in to the black water of Clear Creek.

Julie had stopped in to the eye clinic to pay for some glasses and made a remark to the effect that if it isn’t one thing, it is another. Money just didn’t seem to go far enough.

“I know what you mean,” Sharon said.

As they talked—Julie couldn’t recall how it came up—but the subject of life insurance was broached.

Sharon confided that she had purchased three policies on her husband's life. It was her way of ensuring her survival in the event that the unthinkable happened.

“If anything happens, I can’t make it alone. I had to forge his name,” she said.

Sharon was such a talker, such a relentless braggart, Julie Whitley wasn’t sure if she had in fact forged her husband's name, or if she was just thinking out loud.

“I wish I could get away with that,” Julie shot back. “If I could, I would. Dying is the only thing that you can count on. Might as well have someone profit from it.”

Sharon nodded.

As Julie Whitley saw her, Sharon was a woman with ambitions far beyond Trinidad. She wanted to be ensconced in the country-club set in a place where the cachet actually meant something. Trinidad wasn’t big enough, fast enough, good enough.

“In Trinidad they are either on welfare or they are wanting out. I didn’t think anything of Sharon's desire for more. I wanted out of Trinidad, too,” Julie later said.

When the rumor mill churned with the persistent gossip that Perry had fled to Mexico and was awaiting Sharon to break away to come to his side, those closest to the Nelsons almost laughed. Why would sleeping with Gary Adams be part of such a plan? Why would Perry renew his pilot's license just days before his disappearance? Why get the VW all fixed up for camping when you’ll never have a chance to use it?

Sharon continued to be a figure who invited opinions, a woman who courted rumor. Innuendo was her shadow. As her true character became more evident, the talk increased. She was a slut. A whore. Probably a killer. Even though they were the closest neighbors to the Nelson place, the Thorntons tried to stay out of the fray and kept their opinions to themselves. When

Nester Baca, a Las Animas County Sheriff's deputy, visited with Ray one afternoon at their ranch house, he started the ball rolling. His gut told him that Sharon had killed her husband. “I know it,” he said. “I just can’t prove it.” Sharon wasn’t completely out of the loop. She heard the occasional comments about her character after Perry disappeared. She knew people could be nasty with their comments. Gossip was an Olympic event in rural Colorado. But what did they know of her life? What did they know of what she had gone through before Perry died?

“I can easily understand why people would say I was greedy,” she told a friend sometime later. “I can understand that. Things, status, meant a great deal to me. They were my shell, I guess you could say. I wasn’t white trash. I loved the things Perry bought me. I loved the freedom to buy whatever I wanted without having to account for a dime. It was almost like everything Sharon wants, Sharon can have. She doesn’t have to account for it. I’d had to account for change from a quarter if I bought a dime pack of gum with Mike.”