Sex. Murder. Mystery. (7 page)

Barb, then 54, had heard Sharon’s name many, many times over the course of the summer. Too many times, she felt, to let pass without comment. Sharon this. Sharon that. A month before the doctor announced his new hire was headed for the Trinidad office, Barb asked about her.

“Who is this Sharon you keep talking about?”

Perry grinned from ear to ear. “Why, Barb, she’s our preacher’s wife—Sharon Fuller.”

Barb’s eyes bulged. She was nearly dumbstruck. “Preacher’s wife? My goodness, and you’re carrying on over her like this?”

Perry shrugged. His lips formed a wistful smile as he thought of Mrs. Fuller.

“Oh, she’s a doll. I’d give anything to have her,” he said.

Barb, of course, knew Dr. Nelson had strayed in his marriage in the past. She didn’t have her head buried in the gritty bottom of a sand trap. She felt Dr. Nelson’s interest in the minister’s spouse was far beyond any transgression the eye doctor had made in the past. Miles beyond. He was playing with fire in the form of a woman. Sharon Fuller was the mother of two little girls, the wife of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister.

Years later, Barb Ruscetti would never forget her initial impression of Sharon when she arrived for the supposed training.

“She came in and it was all lovey-dovey. There was no breaking in, let’s face it. She went into his examining room and she was supposed to take notes. Oh, they just kidded around and everything.”

At 11 A.M. that first day, Perry told Barb that she could go to lunch.

“You don’t have to come back at one if you don’t want to,” he added.

Lunchtime had always been from noon to one. Perry Nelson was a stickler for keeping the office schedule. Patients counted on it. Barb was stunned by his words.

My God, I was ten minutes late one day and he ate me up alive,
she thought.

Barb canceled appointments, one right after another, planted herself at her desk and fumed. Some help Sharon Fuller was going to be for the business! There was no breaking in this lady. There was no way to teach her a damn thing. The preacher’s wife had her own agenda and Dr. Nelson didn’t seem to mind one bit. He had his own ideas, too.

That following Sunday, a motel manager stopped Barbara Ruscetti as she was coming out of church.

“I met the doctor’s wife,” the man said, explaining that Perry and Julie had checked into a room at his motel.

It surprised her. It was not like Julie to do anything like that.

“You did? Julie?” Barb asked as they strolled outside into the brightness of the day.

The man smiled. “Yeah, isn’t she cute?”

Something about the motel manager’s compliment made Barb feel funny. While Julie Nelson was sweet and kind and not at all unattractive, no one would call her “cute.” Cute was not a word that went with Julie. Loyal. Motherly. Caring, yes. But not cute.

“What does she look like?’’ Barb eventually asked, knowing full well her question would spark suspicion. She didn’t care.

“She has auburn hair and really nice-looking blue eyes,” he said.

That description confirmed for Barbara that the woman at the motel had not been Julie. Julie had dark brown hair. The woman the motel manager was describing was the preacher’s wife Sharon Fuller.

What kind of woman is she? She’s coming down to Trinidad and she’s got two little kids and she’s married to a preacher. Here she is shacking up at a motel, Barb thought.

Perry Nelson was a wonderful man, in many, many ways.

But he was not a saint and he’d be the first one to tell someone that fact. Over the course of their years together, Barbara Ruscetti had seen the doctor put his own spin on the concept of a doctor’s bedside manner. He had a roving eye for attractive, available women. Barb couldn’t count the number of times she had seen “no charge” written on the exam cards of beautiful women, who lingered in the doctor’s office and stopped by to say hi. There were other, more concrete, signs, too. When the doctor brought his motor home from Rocky Ford under the pretext of staying the night in Trinidad to catch up on paperwork, Barb had a notion something was going on. She would never forget the time she and her son went to watch a movie and ran into the doctor and a girlfriend.

“Urn…uh…uh…Just met here… so we happened to sit together… ”

The next morning, Barb arrived at the office in time to catch the doctor and the same lady friend climbing out of the motor home.

But Barb could forgive all of that. Though she knew it was wrong, she didn’t tell Julie Nelson about her husband’s dalliances. She didn’t think it was her place to do so. She also didn’t think Perry Nelson meant anything by it. Barb never doubted the man loved his wife and three daughters. She never doubted that when the day was done, he’d always return to his family. Barb didn’t want to make waves.

Perry Nelson was a man who earned such loyalty effortlessly. He was revered by many in the community. He was trusted. Little old ladies lined up for eye exams with the charming doctor who good-naturedly gibed them. When Barb’s daughter wanted a typewriter—an electric typewriter, no less—it was Perry who came through with one for a Christmas present.

He handed out more donations to the needy than the local Salvation Army. Until Barb started screening them out, drunks from the Lone Star down the street staggered over for a quick ten bucks and a short lecture on the evils of drinking. Perry Nelson had a heart of gold. He would do anything for anyone. While it was true some of the more desperate took advantage of that generosity, Perry didn’t seem to care. He didn’t judge. All people were good. Most were trying the best that they knew how.

But the woman from Rocky Ford was a different animal. From the day of their first meeting at the office, Barb Ruscetti could feel it in her bones.

“She’s a bitch on wheels,” Dr. Nelson’s secretary told a friend over coffee one day, after meeting Sharon in the flesh. “She’s not nice. You know what I mean? Not nice.”

Some old-timers winced at the reality that Trinidad’s most famous citizen was Dr. Stanley Biber, a man who’d performed more sex-change operations than anyone on earth. Those who lived there before television and the tabloids discovered Dr. Biber’ s eccentric, but thriving, practice, wanted the town to be known for Bat Masterson, Tom Mix and its Old West flavor.

It seemed everyone knew one of the transsexuals who had decided that the place where they lost their penis was the place they’d call home.

Dr. Biber’s downtown office was on the floor above Dr. Nelson’s practice in the First National Bank building. Barb Ruscetti would often ride the elevator with prospective patients, leaving her to wonder exactly what they had left under their skirts.

But she didn’t care. She had worries far greater than Annie the Tranny or any of the others.

At least they were honest about who they were.

It wasn’t easy, but Barb Ruscetti tried to like Sharon. Barb tried to take Sharon under her wing and show a kindness that she hoped would rub off onto the younger woman. She tried to go along with what she knew was a bad situation. Since everyone but a fool and a hermit had a citizens band radio in the remote canyons around Trinidad, when it came time to give Sharon a handle, Barb (“Spec Lady”) dubbed Sharon “Doctor’s Doll.” Dr. Nelson was “Spec Man.”

Sharon always talked of money and how she didn’t have any on a preacher’s salary. She talked of what she would buy if she was rich. Once Barb offered Sharon a dress that had been hanging in the back of her closet far too long. It certainly wasn’t the flashy younger woman’s style, but Barb asked if she thought her mother might like it.

“She’d be thrilled to death,” Sharon said, smoothing out the fabric of the garment as Barb presented it to her. “All my mother wears is cotton dresses.”

Barb asked her why that was so.

Sharon turned away. She was embarrassed about something.

“Because I come from a very poor family,” she said finally, as though being poor meant she should have been ashamed.

Barb was left to wonder if Sharon’s money grabbing ways had more to do with her childhood than being married to a stingy-fisted preacher.

Julie Nelson was not completely blind. She knew her husband was slipping away once more. The good Lord knew she had been through it so many times that it had almost become a way of life. She had left her husband only once when she could not take it anymore. But after three months of Perry’s pleading and the reality of a broken home for her daughters, Julie returned to Rocky Ford. Julie was tired of putting on the happy public face when everyone in town knew her husband was a womanizer. Whenever he found a new woman to romance, Perry would fling compliments around the room. It was as if by building some other woman up, he’d be able to hurt Julie even more.

Perry went on and on about the minister’s wife. What a great worker she was.

Right, great worker when she’s on her back.

How sweet she was.

Sweet as honey pie dipped in sugar and rolled in razor blades.

How everyone adored her at the office. In fact, Perry said, Sharon and Barb were like mother and daughter.

The woman’s a bitch on wheels.

Both parties in the Nelson marriage knew it was hard to change. Tearful promises were made over the phone, in the darkness of a bedroom. Forgiveness was sought. When a man promises his wife he will never stray again, the woman wants more than anything to believe it so. Julie Nelson had bought into her husband’s promises more than once. She had tried to keep their marriage intact for the sake of their daughters. And later, she would wonder why she stayed so long, when there had been no chance Perry could really get it right.

But stay she did. For a time, it seemed a miracle had occurred. It seemed like God’s hand had touched her wayward husband and brought him to his senses.

Before Sharon arrived in town, other friends saw it, too.

“Perry had really changed. He had come around to what’s important. He changed. He was a person who did a lot of exercising. He would get up very early in the morning, exercise, read his Bible. He was a Sabbath school teacher and a very earnest Christian,” a friend recalled.

Many had hoped Dr. Nelson was one of the rare individuals who knew second chances were gold, both precious and rare.

Sharon Fuller arranged for a baby-sitter after Perry called to see if she wanted to ride down to Trinidad in the motor home. He planned on filling up the rig’s holding tanks—the water supply in Rocky Ford wasn’t fit to nourish houseplants, let alone drink. After the water was loaded, they’d stop off at the office for “some training” before returning to Rocky Ford.

Much to Barb Ruscetti’s chagrin, the doctor and new helper spent the afternoon charting patients and brushing against each other like high schoolers in lust.

Sharon later said what happened next was inevitable.

“I just knew it was going to happen. There wasn’t any other way,” she told a friend. “By the time we left the office in Trinidad that afternoon,” Sharon continued, “there was no mistaking in either his mind or my mind what was going to happen in the motor home.”

The signals that had started from the moment they met and lingered over the weeks of the summer had been loud and clear.

The two left Barb to close down the office while they set course for Rocky Ford. Halfway home, Perry guided the motor home off the highway. He parked in a secluded area at the edge of a travelers rest stop. Three trees framed the patch of grass around a picnic table. The sun was low in the sky. In a few minutes, they undressed and made love.

“It was everything I thought it would be. It wasn’t hurried. It wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t forced. It was the most natural thing,” Sharon said afterward.

Chapter 4

TODAY THEY CALL IT THE “GREAT Disappointment.” Seventh-Day Adventists trace their church history to William Miller, a New Hampton, New Yorker, who predicted the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ would take place October 22, 1844. His prophecy, first voiced thirteen years before the end was to come, begat the attention of a growing group of followers. Nineteen years later, the sect splintered into what became the foundation for the modern-day Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

Since then, followers have held to the unshakable belief the Bible is the literal translation of the word of God. The human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Believers do not smoke, drink alcohol, eat meat or wear jewelry. Church followers share a lifestyle beyond mere beliefs. And they pay for it. Ten percent of a family’s income is gifted to the church in the form of a tithe.

Adventists still believe the second coming is imminent. Death is only a sleeping state until He comes. And, of course, they follow a seventh-day Sabbath. Worship services are held in pleasant—though somewhat austere—churches on Saturdays. Being an Adventist is more than following a religion. It is a culture, a way of life.

On July 3, 1945, Sharon Lynn Douglas was born into such an existence.

When the memories of her childhood came so many years later, she pressed her slender fingers, nails lacquered like red Chinese boxes, to her lips. It was as if by doing so she could stifle the very recollection of what resonated through her mind. The instant it came flooding back, she knew such retrospection had been throttled for decades for good reason. To avoid thinking about what had happened to her was to save herself from being a slave to the past. Sharon Lynn buried her face into her hands, soft curls of bleached blond hair falling past her wrists. She wanted no part of the past, and in fact had spent the last third of her adult life trying to escape it. She was MGM’s Dorothy in Oz and her first twenty-five years had been nothing but grainy images in black and white. Color only came when there was freedom.

Her tear ducts rained when she deliberated on growing up inside the impervious shell of fraudulent perfection.

“I had to be the compliant little person, but I got tired of it. So I’d have my little sneaky ways to find someone who would make me feel I was pretty, and I was important. I think I could have been a real good minister’s wife/call girl.”

When her awakening came as a young woman, it was the result of a desire to cast off the restrictions of the past, to possess everything she saw. Sharon had missed so much. She had been deprived. She would no longer wait.