Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  When she’d pick up the receiver, Lorri could feel her heart stop for a second, only to start up again when it was instantly evident the caller was not her father. Sometimes her voice would catch just a little, perhaps signaling to the caller the young woman on the other end of the line was in some kind of trouble.

  “I'm fine,” she’d say.

  At the grocery store, Lorri would see a man who resembled her father. Driving by a service station she’d crane her neck to watch a man as he pumped gas. It was him! She’d be certain, just for an instant, that her father was there. Then the disappointment would take over. And even though it was never Perry Nelson, even though no body had been found, she held out hope that he’d be alive.

  “I wish my dad would send a postcard or call,” she said to her husband for the umpteenth time. Darrell Hustwaite had grown weary of that particular broken record. It wasn’t that the kind-hearted mechanic didn’t respect his wife's terrible grief; it was that he saw the futility in it.

  “Gee, Lorri! This is killing you. You’ve got to get over it.”

  But she couldn’t. She seemed unable to set it aside. When word came from friends in Colorado that talk about her father had shifted to the idea that he had fled the country to Australia and was never coming back, Lorri was relieved.

  At least he isn’t dead, she thought.

  Lorri confided to friends how she felt when she heard her dad might have left the country to escape Sharon and the IRS.

  “If he's alive and safe, it's okay. Things must have been horrible at home. Maybe the only way he could get away from Sharon was to disappear?”

  One afternoon a few weeks after Perry disappeared, neighbors and real estate agents Ann and Bernard Parsons drove up to go over some business matters Sharon had asked about. They noticed Danny Nelson playing in a sandbox in front of Round House.

  As Ann walked to the front door, Bernard called out to the little boy.

  “Is your mother home?”

  “Mom's in the house. Dad's in the river!” the boy called out.

  Bernard chuckled at the peculiar response.

  “What did he say?” Ann asked as she walked up the steps to the front door.

  “Tell you later.”

  When they got back in the car after talking with Sharon, Bernard repeated Danny's words.

  “Mom's in the house! Dad's in the river!”

  Chapter 17

  WHEN HE TOLD SHARON THE STORY OF HOW HE killed her husband, Gary sometimes altered the tale. Sometimes he said he wasn’t sure if it had worked. Other times he embellished the saga. Sharon would later say she didn’t know what to believe. She didn’t know what really happened. But Gary, in fact, did know.

  He told her about the drive up to Denver to get the guns, how Perry had chatted along the way, not knowing what was about to happen….

  Gary asked Perry to stop for a beer, though that wasn’t the real reason for the delay. As the two shared a beer in a tavern in Castle Rock, Gary excused himself to use the bathroom. With Perry sitting behind half-empty beer glasses, Gary Adams made his way to a pay phone and dialed the number of a buddy with whom he had briefly lived near Denver.

  “Pick me up at midnight at the first tunnel past Golden,” he said.

  The friend agreed.

  The beer-buzzed doctor and the carpenter drank a while longer, then left to get some shut-eye before driving back to Wet Canyon in the morning.

  It was around midnight. The road was slicker than still-warm roadkill. The rain had been relentless, drumming the windows of the old VW with pellets hard enough to make one flinch. Perry hated driving in the rain. Any other kind of weather condition was easier, even snow. Unless it was a whiteout, at least the driver could see at night during a snowfall. Gary looked straight ahead at the roadway, his nervousness not overwhelming enough to stop him from what he had planned to do.

  Perry pulled into a parking strip next to Clear Creek to get some sleep. Gary swung the door open and got out.

  “Gotta take a leak,” he said.

  Perry nodded and went to work on reclining the car seats so the two could stretch out and snooze until morning light.

  Gary didn’t have a tire iron this time, so he went down to the water's edge to look for a rock that would do the job. It was dark and every stone seemed too large.

  Finally, he found one he could lift. He memorized where it was and he returned to the VW.

  “Perry,” he said, “I lost my wallet down there. Can you give me a hand looking for it?”

  Perry nodded before picking up a flashlight and following Gary down to the surging banks of Clear Creek. Some creek— the water from the storm had swollen it to a raging river. The beam of the flashlight stretched a white line through the night air as it slid across the wet boulders flanking the immediate creek side.

  “Can’t see anything,” Perry said, his head bent low as he searched the area.

  Gary hoisted a large rock of fifteen to twenty pounds and slammed it hard against Perry's slightly balding head. He would later admit he had used all his might to do so. He had no clue that the human skull was so resilient.

  Perry fell to his hands and knees into the icy water. In a second, blood and water running down his face and into his beard, he jumped back up. Gary couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Why wasn’t he knocked out? The icy water? The adrenaline pumping through his terrified body? Why wasn’t he out cold?

  Gary pushed Perry back down and tried to hold his head under the water. The two men thrashed, Gary trying his damnedest to keep the upper hand. Yet Perry was holding his own. He was much taller. He weighed more. And by then he must have known he was fighting for his life.

  Gary put all his weight on top of his flailing friend and held him under the water. But again, just as he thought he’d completed what he set out to do, Gary was stunned by Perry Nelson's strength. He rose out of the water once more.

  “Like a freakin’” horror movie.

  At one point, Gary slipped under the frigid, waist-high water. The water's sudden depth scared him. The fighting had taken the two men further from the shore. And all of a sudden, as if it was meant to be, the current swept Perry Nelson away. Gary watched as the man he had called his friend, the man whose wife he had been screwing for months, floated down Clear Creek.

  He was gone.

  Gary, scraped and covered in sand, mud and blood, got behind the wheel of the VW and drove it a half mile away. When he hit about 20 mph, he swung the door open and rolled out. The car slipped into the creek, its headlights still on.

  The goddamn thing's floating!

  Volkswagens are watertight. Everyone knows that. Gary knew it. What was he thinking? Dr. Nelson's car had become a beacon. His heart raced as he watched the VW bob along the current of the creek. If a. car came by the driver would surely see it. He held his heaving breath and waited. In a couple of minutes, relief came. The creek twisted and the car disappeared around a sharp bend.

  It had not gone exactly according to plan.

  “The plan was in my head: Knock Perry unconscious, hold him underwater so he’d drown, drag him up the bank, put him in the VW, then drive him in.”

  He couldn’t be sure if he had done the job. There was the slim possibility Dr. Nelson had made it to shore and was still alive. Gary walked along the shore searching without the aid of a flashlight, hoping that he had killed his friend.

  Hoping, above all, he would not disappoint Sharon.

  With Sharon and Gary entwined like a vitrine of snakes, it didn’t take long for people to wonder out loud. Wet Canyon neighbors Ray and Candis Thornton were among those who could not hold suspicions inside any longer. What was happening up in Round House wasn’t right. A man disappears and his wife has a lover move in right away? Something was going on. Something ugly.

  When the Thorntons ran into a couple friendly with Gary Adams, they finally said they thought Sharon and Gary had conspired to kill Perry.

  “No,” the friend said. “I
t couldn’t be. Gary was in church the day after Perry was missing. He had his Bible with him and he was praying.”

  Kindergarten teacher Candis discounted the image. She didn’t trust Gary Adams. Going to church was a ruse.

  “He's like a wild man. He’d steal from you… and look you in the face and tell you how much he loved you. I’ve never seen anything like him. He has the most piercing blue eyes, so unbelievably evil.”

  Husband Ray agreed. “His eyes are like two blue ice cubes. They are coldest blue I have ever seen.”

  The eyes of a killer, he thought.

  The woman in the sling-backs was also poison. Even Candis Thornton finally had to admit it. Yet she was torn. She still wanted to like Sharon Nelson. Candis was the kind of woman who wanted to see the good in people. There was enough ugly stuff in the world as it was.

  If Sharon had kept her questionable escapades within the confines of Round House, that would be one thing. But over the course of her years in the Canyon, Sharon had proven she had no boundaries. A pattern had emerged. Dr. Nelson's wife was expert at befriending a couple, ingratiating herself and charming her new friends with stunning fluency.

  Then, when the wife was sucked into a one-sided friendship, Sharon would have sex with the woman's husband.

  “I know she's doing this beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Candis told a friend, reliving the life and times of Sharon Nelson. “I saw it happen two times. I just can’t believe how the woman is acting.”

  At least, Candis could count her blessings. Her husband, Ray, had despised Sharon from day one.

  Barbara Ruscetti met Nancy Adams at a Weight Watchers meeting and liked her very much. When she heard about Sharon and Gary messing around, Barbara felt a surge of sympathy for Nancy. Her husband was just another notch on Sharon Nelson's bedpost.

  Barb would never forget a story she heard about the goings-on in Wet Canyon. It seemed Nancy wasn’t as much of a pushover as her reputation had it.

  “The mailman was a good friend of mine and he said Danny had taken the mail out of the Adams’ box and put it into another mailbox and Mrs. Adams got very upset. So she went up to Sharon's house and told Sharon that if she didn’t keep her goddamn brat away from her mailbox that they were going to have him arrested. So Sharon and Gary's wife had a great big fight. And I understand it was a knock-down-drag-out. And supposedly, Gary went up to Sharon and told her not to ever touch his wife again. They supposedly were sweethearts! He was supposed to be living with her! But then the first move she made on Gary's wife, Gary was defending the wife, not Sharon.”

  Another time there were more fireworks between Gary's women. Bolstered by her husband's promises, Nancy felt it was she that would stay Mrs. Adams.

  Sharon was sure she was the one.

  Nancy Adams fixed her eyes with the kind of steely stare the Other Woman dreads. Without a single word uttered, there would be no mistaking that she was about to tell Sharon to back off and keep away from her man.

  The man is mine. He shares my bed, not yours. Keep your mitts to yourself, you bitch. You home-wrecking whore.

  It was that kind of look.

  “Stay away from Gary,” she said. “Don’t drop notes in the mailbox. Don’t do anything.”

  Sharon didn’t say a word. She simply turned and walked away.

  Living a life between two women had become routine for Gary Adams. Whenever he had the chance, he’d make up an excuse to leave the Dude Ranch and head up the ridge to Sharon's place. Nancy knew what was going on, but she couldn’t stop her husband. And while the draw had been the sex, Gary knew in time there would be money. Lots of it. As the days went on and her husband went out to visit or go to town, Nancy Adams was left alone to smolder. She was fed up.

  When Gary told Nancy it was best for her to take their son and get a job in Denver, she gladly complied.

  Though he had sought the separation, Gary, however, remained agitated. His nerves were shot like a rural road sign. He was falling apart and he knew it. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife and son; he needed Sharon more. Sharon was everything.

  Nancy packed up, drove away from Wet Canyon and moved in with her mother. She was justifiably heartbroken over her husband's relationship with Sharon, but she didn’t want to give up so easily. The small woman with the big eyes had a history with Gary that went back to her teenage years. He was her one and only. She lost her virginity to the man, and there had been no others. In love as she was, Nancy was not a complete dummy. A few weeks after she left for Denver, Nancy decided to return to the Dude Ranch. She found out her husband and Sharon Nelson were living together, carrying on like lovesick teenagers. Everyone in town knew it, too.

  This time Nancy stood up for herself. Damn the ties. Damn the years they had spent, the family they had been once. She told her blue-eyed honey that she was leaving him. She was filing for divorce in Denver. She wasn’t going to play the fool to Sharon Lynn Nelson.

  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!”