by Gregg Olsen
“We’ve got to get our crying done now,” she said. “We can’t say anything about this to Aunt Sharon and the kids. We don’t want to upset them.”
When Sharon and her children arrived in Colorado Springs, Judy kept her promise. No one uttered a word about Perry. There were no outbursts. It was a nice, pleasant visit. It was almost as if nothing had happened.
Back in Rocky Ford, everyone knew Dr. Nelson was missing, presumed dead—or, if he had a lick of sense left, had run away from his no-good second wife. When Sharon came to the Watkins Medical Arts Building to tell the tale of Perry's tragic disappearance, she gathered a group of women together in one of the back offices. She sobbed about being left alone, not knowing what happened or what her future held. She cried into a tissue as she professed her love for her missing husband.
Iona Hamilton was among those who saw Sharon that day. Iona, of course, had known Perry long before he got involved with the preacher's wife. She’d never thought much of the marriage in the first place. She remained cool to Sharon, and sensed Dr. Nelson's wife clearly understood that she’d get no sympathy from her.
After Sharon departed, Iona and Blanche Wheeler marveled over her grief-ridden performance.
“I doubt those tears were genuine,” Iona said.
Blanche agreed with Iona's blunt assessment.
Sharon seldom returned to Rocky Ford after that particular visit.
If Perry Nelson were dead, he wasn’t even cold by the time Sher put his Trinidad practice on the sale block. If Dr. Nelson were alive, she surely must have known he wasn’t coming back. She had waited only a matter of a few days after his car was yanked from Clear Creek. As she had always done, Sher Nelson surprised everyone.
Later, she tried to explain her actions.
“The reason I put the practice up for sale so soon is—it took over two years to find a buyer for the RF [Rocky Ford] practice and I knew also that a practice without a doctor doesn’t sell very well, and I want his practice to continue with a new doctor—and according to the president of the Colorado Optometric Association the sooner a practice is listed after death, the better chance a doctor will be willing to take it over. That's why.”
Not long after Sharon put it up for sale, Jim Whitley talked with one doctor who had been mulling over buying Dr. Nelson's Trinidad practice.
“I'm looking into it,” the other doctor said. “Sharon Nelson is going to continue on, keeping the books—”
Jim cut the man short.
“You don’t want her. Buy the equipment. Buy the business. But leave her alone. Can’t trust her for anything, especially bookkeeper.”
Jim recalled an incident several months before when he needed a new pair of glasses and Sharon told him that she’d make him a deal if he’d pay her directly instead of through the regular billing procedure. She’d get the cash and he’d save a few bucks. Barb Ruscetti overheard the conversation and made a beeline for the back room to tell Dr. Nelson.
Sharon just grinned and rolled her eyes.
Ooops, caught again!
As she sold off assets, Sharon continued to keep office hours at Country Club Drive. She continued to fill prescriptions and order glasses for the few customers who straggled in. She continued to bewilder Dr. Mitchell. He knew that the Nelsons had no money and the business was a mere shell.
“How are you going to pay for this?” he asked one afternoon when Sharon placed another lens order.
“I'm not. I need the money and it's too bad for them. I’ve got kids to support. Perry's left a big mess behind.”
She had no compunction about sticking the optical labs for more money. She seemed to be able to justify anything.
With Sharon so oddly calm, the Mitchells and the Whitleys began to wonder if the accident had been some kind of a setup. The Nelsons had been so desperate for money, they figured, Perry and Sharon might have cooked up the scheme to fake his death for insurance money. It wasn’t an original idea. All had heard cases where the husband took off for a few years and his wife had him declared dead to collect a fat insurance settlement. Many recalled an episode of TV's Unsolved Mysteries that could have been a blueprint for what Sharon and Perry might have carried out.
Terry Mitchell wouldn’t put it past either of the Nelsons. Perry was in a world of financial hurt and was damn near suicidal. Sharon, he thought, had no conscience and would do whatever she could to get her hands on a wad of cash. He was sure that when it came to her questionable character, he had seen only the tip of the iceberg. Fraud and deception were a way of life for her.
Dr. Mitchell ran his suspicions past his wife.
“She didn’t seem worried. She wasn’t hysterical. She didn’t even cry. When we wanted to go to the airport to hand out his picture, she said no. She didn’t want to be bothered. She knows something.”
Kay Mitchell agreed.
“And in the car there were no papers, no briefcase. He took everything out and just left his sleeping bag,” she said.
“Yeah, because he wasn’t in the car when it went into the river. Just watch, she's going to have him declared dead for the money.”
Back in Oklahoma City, the Goodheads were still haunted by their visit to Round House the day after Perry disappeared from the face of the earth.
“I don’t know what happened,” Bob Goodhead told his wife Donna. “But one thing I'm positive about is that woman is a liar.”
Donna thought the same thing. She decided to call AT&T and cancel their phone card.
“Bob,” she said, reaching to dial the phone company, “I don’t trust Sharon at all.”
In rural areas like Wet Canyon, gossip is the number-one mode of communication. That had more to do with human nature than the fact there were few phone lines in the remote reaches of Colorado. When Gary Adams moved in with Sharon a few days after Perry disappeared, just about everyone knew it. Some even suspected the affair before the doc drove off to oblivion. Sharon had even complained her husband was cold to her.
“Most people discounted her complaints,” one neighbor said. “I never got the feeling Perry didn’t love Sharon. I don’t think he had a clue about what kind of woman she really was.”
And yet, Gary Adams seemed to be taken in by the woman as well. How else could anyone explain how it was that he up and left his wife at the Dude Ranch and moved in with his lover?
And the question was asked: Where was the doctor? People pondered it in the coffee shop, at the mill and at the church. People who barely knew Perry Nelson were among the most mystified, while those closer to the Nelsons’ situation understood he had tax problems. But to the casual optical customer or the neighbor down the road, he was just a nice fellow who up and disappeared.
Where was his body? People around Wet Canyon had their theories. Some thought he could be dead in the river, the battered victim of a car crash. Others thought he had met a more unseemly fate.
None of that crossed neighbor Ray Thornton's mind. He gave more credence to the possibility Dr. Nelson had fled the country to avoid the steep taxes that he had dodged.
“One of these days I'm going to give it all up and escape to the Cayman Islands,” Perry had said. “A man can live there tax free. One day I’ll be gone!”
Ray also recalled the signs Perry had posted on the perimeter of his property to ward off greedy emissaries of Uncle Sam:
NO TRESPASSING! ESPECIALLY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS!
The searches had turned up nothing. A plane with infrared equipment flew over the creek and its rocky shoreline, looking for the glowing blotch of red that would indicate the heat of a decomposing body.
Nothing was found.
But in Trinidad, some were beginning to wonder if the authorities ought to look closer to home. They wondered if the battered VW had been a ruse, a setup. Perhaps Perry Nelson had never left the mountain house in the first place. Perhaps his body was somewhere on Cougar Ridge.
One theory expressed by many suggested Perry had, in fact, been murdered. His co
rpse hadn’t turned up because he had been buried somewhere on the acreage around Round House.
Sharon's fork hit her plate with a clatter loud enough to turn heads, though thankfully no one in the little restaurant in Westcliffe paid her any mind. Her hands shook so violently she set them in her lap to steady them. But she said nothing. Gary looked up from his breakfast and asked if she was all right.
It had been a month since Dr. Nelson's disappearance.
Sharon, now silently crying, said nothing. She raised her hand and pointed toward a man ten feet away.
Instantly, with no words uttered, Gary knew what she was thinking. The man, who had his back to them, was the same height and build as Perry. His thinning hair was longish and swirled in the technique many men—including Perry—employed to conceal the fact they were balding.
“Get me out of here,” she coughed out. “Now!”
Gary felt his heart sink, and his stomach turn. It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be Perry. He walked over and casually looked at the man's face. It wasn’t Perry. He didn’t look any-thing like him.
Perry was dead.
Sharon almost lost it as they sped away from the cafe. Her tears came in convulsions. Again and again. Gary reached over to comfort her, but she would have none of it. She was scared. Despite the fact the man in the cafe had not been Perry, Sharon had been shaken to the core. Gary checked them into a motel to give her some time to pull herself together. She needed it badly.
It wasn’t Perry. Perry Nelson was dead.
Sharon wrote to Lorri a few weeks after Perry disappeared. It was the only letter she would send to Perry's youngest daughter by his first wife. Lorri wanted to come to Colorado to help in the search for her father's remains. Sharon wrote the letter to discourage her. And if the letter had meant to comfort Lorri, it only pointed out Sharon's own misery. It was, as always, about Sharon. She wrote:
This is such unusual circumstances that even the friends in Rocky Ford have a difficult time knowing what to do or say… at the point where his body does surface, people will be able to see the reality of the nightmare I’ve experienced for the last month.
Lorri, I want him found more than anyone, but I also know, I couldn’t handle being the one to find him at this point. Your dad lives in my heart, wherever his body is another person will be the best one to find him, for no one who loves him would be able to emotionally handle the situation.
Three weeks after the first search for the doc, more than a dozen of Perry's friends gathered along the banks of Clear Creek to look for the missing man. Leading the group was Sharon and her good pal and helpful neighbor, Gary Adams. All had come with the hope that they would make the grisly discovery. The searchers went with heavy hearts, saddened by the tragic circumstances which had brought them together. All knew Perry Nelson. Their hearts ached for Sharon and her children.
How terrible for them. How awful to go through this kind of tragedy.
Yet if anyone offered a contrast to the dark mood, it continued to be Sharon herself.
Her behavior and attitude was at odds with the seriousness of the exploration. She seemed a little too happy. No one expected her to bawl like a baby. No one needed to see hand-wringing. Everyone knew Sharon and Perry had a marriage rife with arguments and estrangements.
The search party studied the black paint left on the guard rail. Sharon echoed what the police had told her on the previous trip to the site. She considered it conclusive proof the little car had gone over the bank at that point.
“Maybe he lost control and spun out?” someone asked.
Of course, no one knew.
When the bulk of the group drove ahead to pick up the searchers as they walked downstream, Sharon and Gary remained behind, inseparable.
“It seemed like an outing. She was too buoyant. It struck me that something wasn’t right. It was obvious something was going on between Gary and Sharon,” said a man who participated in the search.
After they could look no more, the group ate at Pizza Hut and drove back to Trinidad. Gary and Sharon went up to Round House and went to bed.
By the time everyone knew Perry was missing, the rumors his widow was shacked up with a carpenter named Gary Adams made it as far as Barbara Ruscetti's ears in Trinidad. She was appalled, but not surprised. When Perry came back—if he did come back—there would be hell to pay. Sharon had messed around with Buzz Reynolds, but Barb, for one, didn’t think her old boss would tolerate another.
This Gary Adams would be in big trouble, she thought.
Whenever Barb had the chance, she brought up Gary's name to see what others knew about him.
“Everybody said he was a real nice-looking man,” she said later. “Very easygoing, but everybody said, too, there's a real scary part of him. That he makes you afraid of him right away. That you don’t trust him.”
As much as she professed her love for her “Mountain Man,” Sharon wasted little time in making him over.
Gary Adams had never used hairspray in his entire life. He barely did more than wash and comb his brown hair into place. Yet Sharon had a manly beauty regimen for him. She actually blow-dried his hair and sprayed a style into place. There were bottles of lotions for his skin and a wardrobe of new clothes. She bought him skintight pants, she said, to show off every bulge to his advantage.
To her advantage, really. Sharon loved to look as much as she loved to touch.
Sharon, Gary once told a friend, tried to mold him into her ideal. Into the image of the man she wanted above all others. It seemed she desired a man that would screw her like something out of a pornographic movie in the morning and take her out for a fancy dinner in the evening. She had imagined a life of lusty class. She had the money coming in and the appetite for both. Everything was the best that money could buy.
Gary was there for the ride.
Beyond the sex, Sharon and Gary had few moments of bliss in their relationship. In fact, the longer they stayed in bed, the better they got along. The kids were the largest bone of contention, though other things got in the way, too.
When Gary tried to hook up a VCR, Sharon jumped into the process.
“No,” she said, in her know-it-all voice. “That's not the way you do it.”
Ten minutes passed. More hopelessly confused than ever, Sharon gave up as if Gary had so screwed up the cables that no one outside of a factory-trained representative from Sony could fix it.
“Just do your cooking and let me hook up the VCR,” Gary said bitterly, as Sharon left the room.
There were times when he wanted to smack her, too. If Perry ever hit Sharon, Gary could see why. In bed she was the best he’d ever had. But they could do that only so often. There were times when they actually had to talk or do other things. Those were the times when Sharon would make him mad.
And whenever it suited her, Sharon used sex to smooth things over with her lover.
“At times,” Gary Adams said years later, “she would use it as a peacemaker. If she thought I was really mad, she’d really come on with the charm… turn it on and off just like a water faucet. And other times, she could be as cold as ice toward me.”
Sharon also put off what needed to be done. It seemed to Gary that she’d rather play (preferably in bed) than do anything. Sometimes that was just fine with him, but when hauling water or getting supplies in town was necessary, it was frustrating.
“You must think ahead,” he kept telling her. “You can’t play all the time. You got to work at times.”
Sharon pooh-poohed his work-ethic. This was her turn to live a little. This was her time. Her dream. And if Gary didn’t like it, he could lump it.
Within two months of shacking up, Gary Adams summoned the nerve to tell Sharon that he could not stand living with her. He told her that though he loved her, he loved his wife Nancy, too. He had called Nancy and she’d agreed to bring their son back to the Dude Ranch. She would give him a second chance.
Sharon didn’t put up a fight. She didn’t think it
was working out with Gary, either. Besides, she had rekindled an old affair.
“I love you, too, but I'm moving in with Buzz,” she said.
Buzz Reynolds—the man who had thrown Sharon out when she became pregnant—had always been the doctor's widow's backup lover during her affair with Gary. He was wealthy, kind and very much in love with her. And though Sharon had conceded a time or two that sex with Mr. Reynolds was not what it had been with Gary, he had plenty to offer.
Namely, he had money.
Perry's parents had done all they could to help Sharon and their grandchildren get through the difficult times after their beloved son's disappearance. When asked by their daughter-in-law, they sent money. When asked to take Danny and Misty for vacations they readily agreed. While they still had strong and loving relationships with Perry's three daughters from his marriage to Julie, the littlest grandson and granddaughter were their last link to their son.
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.”
