Sex. Murder. Mystery. (4 page)

Her lover had been different. Craig was gentle. Not just during sex, but in everything he did. He had a tenderness that drew Sharon closer than she had been with any man. When little Rochelle Fuller’s teddy bear was falling apart, it was Craig who brandished a Band-Aid for the stuffed animal. Sharon felt Mike would have tossed the torn plush toy into a trash bin. Craig had a gentle heart. A man with an easy touch. He was everything she had ever wanted; at least, she told herself so at the time. Sharon always told herself so. Whenever. Whoever. The man she slept with was always the man of her dreams.

Even as they drove across the flat expanses of the Great Plains, thoughts of Craig brought a sentimental smile to her lips, only to be obliterated by Mike’s contemptuous comments about the reason the church had sent them packing for the Rocky Mountain State. Her mind fixated on the day Mike told her they’d be moving.

“We’re being kicked out because you’re a little slut, Sharon!”

His eyes telescoped from their sockets. The veins on his neck bulged with blood.

“A slut!”

Sharon had hurried to Craig’s sister’s house in tears. The humiliation had ripped her apart; her nerves were shot, her eyes were red. Though she did not regret the love she and Craig shared, the bliss they had stolen, she could not erase the feelings of guilt and shame.

Craig’s sister put her arms around the sobbing preacher’s wife.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Sharon said.

At first, the woman didn’t know what she was talking about.

“They kicked us out because I am a slut!” Sharon ranted.

The woman tried to comfort her. “No, Sharon. No,” she said with exaggerated certainty. She told Sharon how church leaders had brought a petition calling for Mike Fuller’s removal as pastor of their church. Her husband, in fact, had signed it. Everyone knew about it. Sharon’s affair with Craig had not even been mentioned.

“It was to get Mike out because everything had to be Mike’s way. You weren’t even in it,” she said.

In later years, Sharon liked to repeat her version of the truth. She was not to blame for the Fullers ending up in southeastern Colorado. She had not been the source of her husband’s downfall in the eyes of the church.

“Once I found out it wasn’t me…that Mike…didn’t want to admit nobody liked him, it was extra hard. Because I was having to leave the first place I ever really felt was my home, because people didn’t like Mike and his arrogance. His arrogance finally came through. We were there four years. Other churches we were only there for a year or so. Toward the end is when his overbearing ways finally got to people.”

There had been no lack of occasions when things could have turned out differently. There always are. There might never have been a long, hot drive to Rocky Ford, Colorado, in Sharon Lynn’s life. She had her out the year before. Yet no one would back her up, no one would support her in her quest for love.

Not her mother, not her father.

It was in 1975 when Sharon Fuller made a single move toward freedom from her husband, freedom toward what she felt was a “truer” self. She was entitled to more. She was deeply in love with Craig when she decided she could leave Mike and start over. She drove from Durham to her parents’ home in Maryland. She told no one she was going. Not her husband—not even her lover. For all the members of the church congregation knew, Sharon and her little ones went to visit an ill grandfather.

Her parents said she was a fool for leaving Mike. They could still work things out. Marriage was not easy. But a commitment before God cannot be tossed away like so much rubbish.

Sharon was in the kitchen when her mother answered a knock at the door from a floral delivery service.

Her mother, Josephine Douglas, rushed back with a stunning bouquet. A hopeful smile broke over the older woman’s face.

“Look, honey, I bet Mike sent you some roses.”

Sharon prayed the flowers had been a gift from Craig.

“They are from Mike,” Josephine said.

“Trash them.”

“Oh, no, honey, they’re God’s creation. They’re beautiful.”

“They’re ugly and I don’t want them.”

“I’ll put them in a vase and put them in my room.”

”I don’t want them in the house,” Sharon said, seizing the box from her mother’s grip and tromping out of the house and throwing the roses on the compost pile.

Mrs. Douglas was furious, but Sharon didn’t care.

“You wasted money, Sharon,” she said. “You should have let me send them back to the florist!”

Sharon ended the conversation by telling her mother she hated the damn flowers.

“They’re ugly,” she said.

A day or so later, another bouquet arrived, this time from Craig. Against her mother’s wishes, Sharon put the flowers in her bedroom.

“She had a fit,” she said later. “She never understood.” In the end, Sharon went back to her husband, partly because of the pull of the Church, a little bit because her mother told her it was the right and sensible thing to do. But she returned to Durham mostly because she figured she had nowhere else to go. When she got back to North Carolina, she learned her husband had been transferred to a church in Colorado. They’d be leaving in a month.

She went to her lover to say good-bye.

“I’m stuck with this,” she told him. “There isn’t any way out for me. Mike’s never going to let me go. I know he’s never going to let me walk away.”

Craig understood. He didn’t try to make Sharon stay. Maybe he hadn’t wanted her to stay? Maybe he knew that by her leaving town, less people would be hurt by their messy affair?

Just before the Fuller family left for the West, a letter arrived from Colorado. It had been signed by three elders from the churches in Rocky Ford and La Junta. All three were doctors: Ted Martin, Karl Wheeler and Perry Nelson. Sharon reread the letter in her Durham kitchen, torn apart by the moving process.

It was a missive welcoming the new minister and his family to their congregation.

“There was something about that letter—about Perry’s name that was like a magnet to me. I wondered what this man was like,” she said, later trying to convince a confidant the connection between the doctor and herself was predestined, preordained in some way.

Both pitched along the Arkansas River, La Junta and Rocky Ford, Colorado, are like many towns that freckle the somewhat desolate region. With a population base nearing the 10,000 mark, La Junta is by far the larger of the two burgs. Its historic claim-to-fame is its location along the Santa Fe Trail. It is also the Otero County seat. Rocky Ford shares no such distinction. It is a rancher’s town set amid the gently rolling terrain that jumps up to the Front Range in a matter of a few miles. It is the home of the sweeter-than-honey Rocky Ford melon. Good schools; scant services. Though only eight miles apart, both towns had congregations of Seventh-Day Adventists. Rev. Mike Fuller would be pastor of both.

Her mouth agape, Sharon stood motionless in the doorway of what her husband had promised would be their new home. Mike poked around the house. Nothing was completed. The builder had gone belly-up. Oak kitchen cabinets were stacked in the garage like children’s building blocks. The bedrooms were rib cages of stud walls. The outside of the modest home was raw stucco, neither finished in the final texture nor coated in the wash of beige coloring builders insist approximates the “look and feel” of adobe.

The Fuller family, exhausted and angry, checked into a motel. By 1 A.M. Rochelle and Denise were suffering from severe and seemingly unstoppable diarrhea. While Mike rolled over and slept, Sharon sat up with the girls and made several trips to the front office for clean bedding. It was a horrendous beginning to a new life in a new town. Sand crept into all of their belongings with an insidious grittiness. The girls survived on Kaopectate and cafe meals, their lips rimmed in chalky white from the medicine. Television talk shows passed the time in the room. There were no friends. No phone calls. No nothing. Since Sharon had left her own car in North Carolina, she was stranded in the stinky motel room while Mike went after the builder who had left them without a finished home. The first days in La Junta were not a page out of the welcome-wagon handbook.

Even the church was a disappointment. By anyone’s standards, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in La Junta wasn’t much to look at. It stood in marked contrast to the beautiful old church that was Rev. Fuller’s charge in North Carolina. Built in the 1930s, La Junta’s church was small, holding no more than one hundred in its three rows of pews, nearly black from old layers of varnish.

Sharon bit her tongue. She didn’t dare complain. After all, Mike had told her leaving North Carolina had been all her fault.

A day or so later, Mike returned after work at the church and told Sharon to get the girls ready for a dinner at the home of one of the congregation’s elders.

Dr. Perry Nelson and his wife, Julie, had invited the new arrivals for dinner.

Perry Nelson was a superstar in southeastern Colorado. He was handsome, intelligent, head church elder and, best of all, a doctor. In a place big on menial jobs and short on the professions, a doctor was the shiniest link of the profession chain. The optometrist with kind but playful hazel eyes had smoothly planed features offset by a neatly clipped salt-and-pepper beard. He was tall at almost six-foot-three and weighed a trim 180 pounds. His medium brown hair was thinning a bit on the top, and in the fashion of many who just can’t let go of youth, he’d let his hair grow a little. Length, he reasoned, was a concealer of the years.

The passage of time notwithstanding, at 43, Perry Nelson seemed to have it all: a loyal wife, three nearly grown daughters, a pleasant—though certainly not ostentatious—home on the corner of Pine and South 12th Streets and successful optometry offices in Rocky Ford and Trinidad. Dr. Nelson was adored by his patients, which amounted to nearly everyone with a need for eyeglasses and contact lenses within fifty miles. He owned a motor home and an airplane. And, certainly among the believers, more importantly than anything, Perry Nelson held a prominent position with the church. So much so, it was a letter written by Dr. Nelson and two others that welcomed the Fullers out to Colorado when their world was crumbling in Durham.

Julie Nelson was quiet, sweet and, Perry chronically whined to friends, cold to him. If in fact she was unresponsive, it was because of her husband’s philandering. It was not the impetus for it. She was the original stand-by-your-man woman, long-suffering and still vulnerable. Julie helped out in his office, worked as a bookkeeper for another doctor and raised their three daughters, Tammi, Kathy and Lorri. Julie made him a nice home and through her devotion cemented his standing in the community. She had endured her husband’s four-year affair with another local woman, and by the time the Fullers came to Rocky Ford, Julie had thought that part of her life was over. She, too, had prayed for a fresh start.

And yet as she readied things for dinner and checked the living room one last time for tidiness, the doctor’s wife had no idea that her world would be turned upside down. Who could have known? Also invited to share in the informal dinner were other leading couples from the Adventist church, including dentist Karl Wheeler and his wife, Blanche.

When the new minister and his wife and two daughters showed up, the fate of so many was sealed with a hermetic bond.

Rev. Mike Fuller made the introductions of his family.

“This is my wife Sharon,” he said.

“Call me Sher,” she corrected. ”I like to be called Sher.”

After that, nothing would be the same.

“Mike and Sharon seemed like a nice average couple,” Julie Nelson said later. “They had two little girls, age two and five, at the time and they seemed like a happy family. I didn’t know there were any problems in the marriage. I thought Sharon was friendly. I guess I liked her.”

Others weren’t so inclined. The Wheelers left the informal dinner party feeling a bit odd about the new woman in town. As they drove from Rocky Ford to their home in the country, Blanche Wheeler tried to put her finger on what it was about Sher Fuller that she didn’t like.

“I don’t know why,” Blanche said, “but I just felt uncomfortable around her.”

Karl Wheeler was a serious-minded man, raised on a Nebraska farm with good Midwestern values. He had also picked up on something unsettling. He stared straight ahead watching the road, listening to his wife. When she was finished, he blurted an answer.

“She’s out looking,” he said as he drove on into the night.

Blanche was puzzled. “Looking?”

“You know what I mean. For a man.”

When word got out the minister and his wife and children were stuck in a motel because their contractor had gone bankrupt, the invitations to dinner came with regularity. Some called. Some came to the church to offer a welcoming meal. The wife of a dentist found the Fullers’ motel unit by tracking down the door closest to the parked convertible with North Carolina plates.

The woman invited Sharon to spend the day baking, sewing, chatting. She took care of the little girls when Sharon and Mike needed to look for a place to live. When the dentist’s wife’s sister came to stay, she also met Sharon. The sister was a quiet woman, not given to uttering a negative word about anyone. But she didn’t like Sharon from the start.

After Mike came to take Sharon back to the motel, the two sisters gathered in the kitchen to talk.

“That woman is trouble,” the visiting sister said.

“What do you mean?”

“You just wait and see.”

The dentist’s wife was surprised by the remark. She probed for more, but her sister didn’t have a good answer. She hadn’t liked the minister’s wife. Not at all.

New blood was needed in Otero County, and Mike and Sharon Fuller had arrived in time for the transfusion. Perry Nelson also needed a boost. He found all of that, and more, in the minister’s attractive wife. The woman had a style, a kind of look that had not yet been quashed by the denim-and-boots uniform common among most gals who lived in the outposts of Colorado. Sharon wore her hair long, her dresses tight, her blouses unbuttoned one notch lower than a woman in her position likely had a right to. Even so, she did not overdo her makeup. In fact, beyond a touch of mascara, Sharon Fuller applied nothing more than a coating of lip gloss over cherry-flavored Chapstick. She didn’t have to bother.