Sex. Murder. Mystery. (31 page)

“I think she just kind of pushed her way into his life. He just wanted to be loved,” she said later.

At first, at least on the surface, it seemed Sharon also wanted to be liked.

When Tara whined about wanting to drive her father's prized 1967 Camaro her pleas fell on deaf ears. It was Glen's pride and joy; he had lovingly restored the car with buckets of money and gallons of sweat. No way was he going to let a sixteen-year-old drive it.

It was Sharon who pressured Glen to give in.

Give the girl a thrill.

She’ll be good,

I’ll be good, too.

“I think that she did it just to get me out of her hair because I was bugging her so much,” Tara commented later. “She didn’t care about the Camaro, not as much as my father did.”

Sharon, of course, had been down that route before with Perry's daughter, Lorri. How it was that she would find men with teenage daughters was beyond her. She had buddied up cajoled, sucked up and lied to her lovers’ and husbands’ kid to get them out of the way. She had done so with the kind o: finesse that's born of practice.

Chapter 23

DIVORCE HADN’T NULLIFIED THE RESIDUAL feelings of closeness and affection Glen and Andy Harrelson had shared during their two-plus decades of marriage. When Glen told his former wife that he was out of his personal funk and involved with a wonderful woman named Sharon Nelson, Andy was delighted. And as time went on, it quickly became obvious this Sharon was more than a fling. Glen wasn’t the type to engage in serial dating. He wanted to settle down. He was in search of his second chance.

“There's one problem,” he told his ex-wife over the phone during one of their almost daily conversations. “She doesn’t know if she wants to get married again.”

He explained how his new love's first marriage to a preacher had ended in divorce and her second husband had died in a terrible auto accident.

“She feels like it's bad luck to be married to her,” Glen said. “Like there's a black cloud hanging over her.”

Andy Harrelson didn’t say anything, but the words bothered her. She felt like the woman's comments were a manipulation of a lonely hearted man. She was pulling back, to make Glen want her more.

Andy concluded Glen's new sweetheart was an operator.

It was very peculiar. Whenever Andy Harrelson showed up to pick up the kids or return something she had borrowed, Sharon would disappear into the back bedroom before introductions were made. And she stayed there.

Glen would make some excuse, but the fact of the matter was clear to Andy. Sharon simply did not want to meet her face-to-face. Andy wondered if Sharon was embarrassed about sleeping with her ex-husband. Maybe she was just plain ashamed. She had been a Seventh-Day Adventist minister's wife, after all. “Living in sin” was definitely not Adventist-approved.

The odd aspect of her back bedroom disappearing act was that Sharon was always very pleasant on the telephone whenever Andy called. She was warm, chatty and very accommodating. It was so strange that Glen's new love was able to talk to on the phone without any apprehensions, but could not face her in person.

Maybe Sharon is shy
, Andy thought.

It was late at night when the bedside phone woke her from slumber. Andy Harrelson's heart thumped, as most are prone to do, when the startling ring comes in the dark hours. The voice was familiar, though somehow different. It was Glen, but he sounded very weak.

“Could you get me and take me to the hospital?” he asked in a near whisper.

Andy knew Glen had mononucleosis and had been languishing with the debilitating illness for several days. Andy got up and dressed in record time to go after him. All the while, she worried about her former husband and wondered about his girlfriend.

Where was this new love of his life, Sharon?

Her answer came mid-morning when Sharon finally showed up at the Denver hospital where Glen was on medication and bed rest.

“I met an old friend, “Sharon announced to her boyfriend while he lay within the stainless steel rails of a hospital bed as IV tubes provided precious liquid to his depleted system.

“It's okay if we go out with other people, isn’t it?” she asked.

Glen's dry lips barely moved. And really, what could he say? When Andy Harrelson thought about it later, she considered Sher's comment to her laid-up boyfriend very strange.
Very cruel
.

“Of course, Glen wanted the relationship exclusive… I guess it was a manipulation to make him hold on tighter,” Andy told a friend.

Outside of Rick Philippi and Mikki Rector—soon-to-be Baker, having fallen in love with Porter Memorial Hospital orderly Steve Baker—none of Glen's friends met Sharon Nelson. Glen talked about Sharon effusively. She was the most wonderful woman that had ever landed in Colorado. She was a great cook. She was a sharp lady. And while he never went into the details—he was too much of a gentleman for that—he told a few buddies Sharon was a fantastic lover. Even though just two had met the mystery woman, most of Glen's other pals saw her influence.

None more so than fire department dispatcher Dean Hastings.

Dean had known Glen for almost ten years, having worked alongside him both in dispatch and at the firehouse. Not long after Glen told him of his new girlfriend—whom he said he met through church—he came into work one day without wearing his toupee.

The transformation startled Dean.

“How come you’re not wearing your hair?” Dean asked.

Glen flashed a sheepish smile. “Well, Sher wanted to see me without it and she likes me better without it.”

Later, when they talked about his new love, Glen told Dean how happy he was. How nice her children were. How Sharon owned a beautiful place down in southeast Colorado, a mountain house near Trinidad.

“How could she afford that?” Dean wondered out loud.

Glen was quick with the answer.

“Insurance money after her husband died in a car wreck. She has the money now, but it was quite a wait for her to get it.”

The friendship had frayed like the hems of someone's weekend blue jeans. Rick had stood firm in his resolve to be a true friend, a friend who wouldn’t lie. He hated Sharon from the onset and blamed her for the dissolving relationship between the two friends. Whenever the group was getting together, Glen would make an excuse for Sharon's absence. In time, Glen stopped coming around, as well.

“I don’t trust her,” Rick said, his blue eyes boring a hole through his friend. “She's trying to keep you from your friends.”

Glen didn’t get it. He disagreed. He said he was stuck in the middle.

“I'm trying to keep the peace,” he said.

“But we’ve been friends longer than you and Sharon.”

None of that mattered to Glen, at least not enough to pull away from Sharon.

“She was always the controller, always wanting to control,” Rick said later. “I kept telling him she's no good, but he wouldn’t listen. He just wouldn’t stay away from her.”

Sharon Lynn Nelson was not the type of woman the now-newlywed Mikki Baker would have picked for Glen, either. She was not the type of woman he had picked in the past for himself when he expressed interest in a woman. Andy Harrelson was a natural beauty, with fine features and little need for makeup. While Mikki, who had battled a few extra pounds, thought Sharon was pretty and had a good body, she considered her sense of style to be somewhat tawdry.

Thank goodness she has a nice figure, because her pants are so form fitting.

“They were so tight you couldn’t believe it,” she told Rick Philippi. “She probably had to lay down to put them on. She had camel toes.”

When Sher wore shorts her attire left nothing to the imagination: it recalled the fashion of the 1960s.

“She doesn’t dress like a woman of her age… or like a mother,” Mikki said.

Rick concurred.

“The girls we know just don’t wear that type of stuff.”

As far as Glen's closest friends were concerned, Sher Nelson was a hot divorcee on the make and Glen was a lonesome guy looking for love. It was that loneliness and desperation for love and companionship that must have made him go with the woman from Weston.

Rick shook his head at the improbable.

Glen was not that type of person that would have a woman like her
, he thought.

“I wonder what he sees in Sher?” he asked Mikki. “I can’t get him to see what I see. She has something that blinds him.”

Mikki didn’t have an answer. She didn’t really need one. Not long after it seemed that Glen and Sharon were inseparable, reports came through other Mends that the relationship was over.

The day Tara Harrelson learned Sharon had left her father and returned to Trinidad was both happy and sad. When she saw her father, her heart broke as he cried about the woman who had left him. Tara felt an awkward surge of happiness for herself. She had not felt that close to her father since Sharon had taken over his life.

“I thought we were back on the right track,” she told a friend later.

Reality had set in. Hooray for reality. Rick Philippi would have jumped for joy if he was sure Glen Harrelson wouldn’t sense it on the other end of the line. He could not have been happier with his friend's disclosure.

“Sher's out of my life,” he said.

“Why?” Rick asked, though the why didn’t really matter.

Ding dong the witch is dead!

“She's got another boyfriend.”

Glen's voice was wracked with grief, but Rick didn’t want to rub it in. Now wasn’t the time for that; there probably never was a time for that. Sher Nelson had done what she was bound to do. Rick hadn’t liked her since their lunch at Burger King.

“She's got another boyfriend and she's been dating you at the same time?”

“Yeah,” Glen said.

“How long has this been going on?”

“On and off for a few years.”

They talked for a while longer and made plans to get together in a day or so. When Rick hung up he had a smile on his face. His old friend was back. Glen was back.

It wasn’t that everyone was jealous of Sharon and her all-consuming relationship with the mild-mannered firefighter. It wasn’t that no one wanted Glen to be happy.
Far from it.
It was simply as clear as a Colorado summer sky to those closest to Glen that Sher was not the right woman for him.

Maybe for anyone.

And yet Glen still told friends that he wouldn’t give up. He was going to marry her.

Some never thought the marriage would take place—the relationship between Glen and Sharon had been so erratic. In fact, most of them also had opinions about whether it should take place. The couple couldn’t even manage to live together for any extended amount of time at the house in Thornton before Sharon hightailed it back to Trinidad. If she loved him so much, why did she leave him? She said she needed her space. She needed to clear her head. Why in the world, friends said, would Glen think a gold band on her finger would make a difference? Get real, man. It was a wedding band, not a leash.

Not long after Glen admitted Sharon had a backup lover in her life, the lovelorn firefighter visited at Rick Philippi's. The news was not good. He and Sharon were talking of getting back together. When the two men went outside to talk, Rick couldn’t bite his tongue, couldn’t hold back any longer.

“Glen, don’t you think it's a good idea to push her out of your life?”

‘I can’t. I really love her,” he said. “And she loves me.”

“Well, she doesn’t love you as much as you think she does,” Rick continued, walking that high-wire act that friends often do when it comes to another's failed relationship. Most people know when a relationship is on the rocks, there is always a chance the estranged couple will reunite. Most know disparaging the other person can often bite back later.

Rick couldn’t stop himself.

“From the day I met her, I didn’t like her. There's something about her.”

“Rick, I understand, but when you’re in love you just don’t throw it away.”

The two men were at an impasse and both knew it.

Rick grabbed the last word.

“I'm sorry, Glen, I think you better find someone else.” For Glen Harrelson, it seemed there would be no other. Sher Nelson with her flashy, fun-loving ways, was the ideal woman for a lonely man looking for love. With Sharon by his side, he felt alive.

Glen Harrelson's smile went from ear to ear. He was as happy as pal Mikki had ever seen him when he ambled into the Thornton offices of the American Family Insurance Co. at the same time she was getting quotes on renter's insurance.

He was beaming. “Sher and I are getting married,” he said.

Mikki wasn’t surprised. She had seen it coming. She was happy for Glen. At least, she wanted to allow herself to be. She only wished him the best and if Sharon made him happy, then that was all she cared about. The eternal optimist, Mikki hoped it would work out.

After announcing his engagement, Glen told Mikki why he was at the insurance office. He came in to put Sharon down as his beneficiary.

Chapter 24

SHARON LYNN WAS IN GLEN’S BLOOD LIKE A virus. The woman was in every thought passing through his mind, day or night. She was everything he had ever wanted. He didn’t want to lose her. Glen recorded an audio tape and mailed it to the P.O. box Sharon kept in Weston. He knew from a previous conversation that her children Danny and Misty would be flying out to see their grandparents in Clear Lake, Michigan. Sharon had to come to Denver to put them on an airplane.

“Stay with me that night,” he pleaded on the tape.

Glen had ulterior motives that went beyond making love for old times’ sake. He wanted marriage. And while Sharon had balked at the proposal in the past, she never said it was an utter impossibility. She said she didn’t know if she could love him enough. She said she felt she was oil and marriage was water. She had two disappointments and didn’t want to end up married as often as a Gabor sister.

Rick Philippi, naturally, was one whose stomach turned somersaults at the prospect of a wedding in the event that Sharon would agree to marry Glen. Glen was such a fool. He was making a big mistake. When Glen asked Rick to attend the wedding, Rick lied, and said, of course, he would stand up for him. Deep down, he knew he could not be there. He could never stand by while that woman married his friend.