Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  Gary changed the subject, telling his brazen beauty that no matter what was done, it was too soon.

  “Besides, you two aren’t even legally married,” he concluded.

  Bart Mason had never met a woman like Mrs. Nelson. What Bart didn’t know was that in the course of most lives very few people had. Bart was a good-looking guy whose interests were in perfect sync with his surroundings. He liked to hunt elk and deer. Several of the mounted deer heads that eternally gazed from the wall of his parents’ restaurant were his trophies. Bart was raised in a farm community a dozen miles from Trinidad; he graduated from Trinidad State Junior College with certificates in diesel mechanics and welding.

  If his friends described him as a hell-raiser, that spoke more to his personality after a beer or two than his everyday demeanor.

  When Harry Russell, a friend of the Mason family, asked Bart to come up to help put up sheetrock in the basement of Sharon Nelson's house in Wet Canyon, the young man agreed. Though Bart didn’t know it at the time, Harry had been involved on and off with the widow whenever Gary was out of the picture or when Buzz no longer satisfied her. In fact, it was Harry—not Gary Adams—that Oklahoma optometrist Bob Goodhead and his wife, Donna, observed in the driveway the day Perry was first deemed missing.

  Years later, Bart would wish that he never laid eyes on mother or daughter.

  Bart's first glimpse of Rochelle Fuller was one morning when he saw her still wearing her nightgown as she went outside to haul water. Bart offered to help and she didn’t even look up as she declined.

  You snotty little bitch, he thought.

  The next day, Bart returned to help out with the Sheetrock. And though he thought Rochelle was a pretty girl, she was undeniably and dangerously young.

  “Are you going to spend the night?” Sharon asked not long after he first started coming around to do the basement finish work.

  “It don’t matter,” he said. While the drive back to Trinidad was a bitch after a long day, it wasn’t so far he couldn’t commute.

  Sharon took his ambivalence as interest.

  “You can sleep downstairs with Rochelle,” she said.

  Startled, Bart didn’t know what to make of the offer. He couldn’t imagine a girl's mother—a normal mother—making that kind of a statement to a young man. If she was asking for trouble, Bart Mason made up his mind, he certainly was not going to give it to her. That night Bart slept with Rochelle, but he kept his pants on and fully zipped.

  “I never touched her,” he said of that first night. “I just respected her.” But in time, Bart succumbed to his attraction for the pretty, young girl. The two, in fact, began to date.

  Sharon continued to court the role of best friend when it came to Rochelle. She told Bart that Rochelle had been under Preacher Mike's thumb for too long and she needed to spread her wings. It was Rochelle's turn to have fun. Consequently, Sharon asked nothing of her oldest daughter. And beyond hauling water now and then, Rochelle did little to help out around Round House.

  Two weeks after Bart started seeing Rochelle, a father was talking to Sharon about his worries about his youngest son. He hoped his boy had enough sense not to mess around and get some girl pregnant.

  “I don’t have to worry about my daughter,” Sharon said, indicating Rochelle. “She's on the Pill.”

  Bart felt his face grow hot with embarrassment, then a surge of anger. It didn’t seem right that a mother would broadcast that about her own daughter.

  Sharon doesn’t have any self-respect, any respect for anyone, he thought.

  About four months after Bart and Rochelle started dating, Sharon asked a question that almost knocked him over.

  “Is Rochelle good in bed?” she asked.

  Bart shot her a harsh stare and turned away. This woman was unbelievable.

  On an outing to a Wal-Mart in Pueblo, Rochelle whined that she wanted a set of hot curlers. Bart, who had just started a new job, said there wasn’t enough money to go around for that kind of item. Not then. When the paychecks rolled in, he’d buy it for her.

  “But I want it now,” she whined.

  Bart stuck to his guns. “Can’t have it.”

  During the young couple's discourse, Sharon stepped forward with a smile. As always, she had an answer.

  “If you want it bad enough, there are ways to get things,” she said.

  The next thing he knew, Sharon and Rochelle had gone through the checkout line and were headed for the car. They had hidden bulky boxes containing a blow-dryer and some hot curlers in the folds of their clothing.

  When Bart found out, he blew his top.

  “I don’t appreciate this,” he said. “It isn’t right. I could lose my job over something like this.”

  “Bart,” Sharon said with a laugh, “sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get what you want in life.”

  And then what became her mantra: “If it ain’t illegal, it ain’t fun.”

  One day, Bart and Sharon's retread lover Harry got into a heated argument over Rochelle. Sharon had invited Harry to move in when she returned from another fight with Buzz Reynolds. No one knew if the break from Buzz was permanent or transitory or if Gary would be back. Nevertheless, while Sharon stayed with Buzz at his ranch, Bart and Rochelle had the run of the house. When Harry Russell moved into the master bedroom of Round House, things changed. He acted like he owned the place. The argument between Harry and Bart started out small and snowballed, the way arguments often do when alcohol is poured into the mix of misunderstanding and control. Bart wanted Rochelle to come to town to watch him play in a Saturday softball tournament. Harry didn’t want Rochelle going anywhere. Harry Russell was in charge— all 350 pounds of him.

  “This is my house!” Harry bellowed.

  A stunned and angry Rochelle and Bart went outside and Harry followed.

  “I’ll do what I want and so will Rochelle!” Bart called over his shoulder.

  “I’ll kick your ass!” the older man yelled.

  “I doubt it,” said Bart as he and Sharon's teenaged daughter got in to his truck and drove off.

  A couple of days afterward, Harry stormed into the little restaurant operated by Bart's parents. He was still hopping mad. Bart, in the midst of getting ready for work at a supermarket construction site, didn’t have time for Harry Russell. Harry, however, was in a talking mood.

  “I'm leaving here,” he said.

  Bart could care less. If anything, he was glad the guy was getting out of town.

  “It don’t matter to me,” the young man fired back.

  Instead of getting angrier and stomping all over the place, Harry Russell dropped the bomb.

  “Last night in bed,” Harry said, “Sharon said that she had Perry killed for fifty thousand dollars and if I didn’t move out she’d have me killed, too.”

  Bart didn’t think so. Harry Russell was such a liar.

  “Yeah, you big piece of shit,” Bart said.

  Not long after the scene at the restaurant, Harry departed from the Trinidad area. Scuttlebutt had it that Sharon gave him $5,000 and a pickup to disappear from Wet Canyon.

  As far as Sharon was concerned, everything, it seemed, had its price.

  Try as she might, Judy Douglas was unable to feel a fondness for Sharon's mountain man boyfriend. There was something about the man that kept a bizarre foothold in her sister's life. She figured some might romanticize it as macho and tough. She saw it as controlling and mean-spirited. Sharon had a hard edge to her at times, too. The two of them were all wrong for each other.

  She watched from a window as Sharon and Gary exchanged heated words in her Colorado Springs backyard one afternoon after Sharon ditched Harry and Buzz and went back to her true love from the ramshackle house at the bottom of Cougar Ridge.

  They’ll never make it, those two, she thought as she turned away. Never in a million years, not unless they give up the power game they keep playing with each other.

  Sharon was no quitter when it came to g
ames. But in the end, Judy figured, the two would simply tire of each other and call it quits. It was all she could hope for. And with Sharon's practice of moving from man to man, it seemed like a good bet.

  Few could understand Lorri's obsession with her former stepmother. It was motivated by hate, not devotion. Sharon was always on her mind. In her dreams. Lorri could never forgive the former preacher's wife for all that she had done to her family. As far as Lorri could see, her parents might still be together if Sharon had stayed in Durham where she belonged. Though Lorri didn’t know it at the time, she needed closure. She needed confrontation with her stepmother. Though her faith told her to forgive, her heart was still broken over the time she had lost with her father. At the very least, she blamed Sharon.

  On a visit from Montana to Rocky Ford, Lorri convinced childhood friend Kerry Wheeler that the two of them ought to drive out to Buzz Reynolds’ place to confront Sharon. When the two young women arrived, they immediately spotted Sharon's Mustang in the driveway. A dejected Buzz stood outside, apparently having heard them drive up.

  “Sher's not here,” he said, when Lorri made inquiry.

  “Then how come her car's here?”

  “She's not here. Moving up to Denver. She's sending Rochelle back for her car later.”

  Lorri didn’t believe him. She looked over Buzz's shoulder toward the house, straining to see a shadowy figure lurking behind the curtains.

  And though Lorri would have liked to have it out with Buzz, too, she softened a bit. Though he wasn’t about to cry, the man with the dark, weathered complexion of a rancher was clearly upset. His heart had been busted.

  “I love Sharon,” he said, sadly. “I wanted to be with her and raise those kids as my own. I would have done anything for her.”

  They talked for a few minutes, about Sharon, about Misty and Danny, and the young women left.

  “Maybe she's here, but she just doesn’t want to see you?” Kerry suggested.

  Lorri shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess with Sharon, I’ll never know.”

  Kerry Wheeler grinned. Trying to catch up with Sharon Nelson was a bit like acting out in a television show.

  “Did you see the curtain move?” she asked.

  Both laughed as Buzz's ranch disappeared from view.

  Gary and Sharon had been talking about their impending marriage for months, probably for as long as they had been together. Throughout the ups and downs, the Harrys, the Buzzs, the others, they had always come back to each other. No one who knew them could make any sense of it. For all Bart Mason knew, it was a marriage made in lust. Gary and Sharon were moving to Denver to get away from all the bullshit of the Canyon. To escape the stares and the whispers. To start over.

  Bart and Rochelle were planning on staying in Round House while Sharon and Gary rented a house outside of Denver.

  One day while Bart worked outside in the frosty chill of a December day, Sharon and Rochelle approached him.

  “Rochelle wants a commitment,” Sharon said.

  Rochelle stood there, saying nothing.

  Bart was caught off guard. “Yeah?”

  “Well,” Sharon said, “will you marry Rochelle?”

  Bart was unprepared. He never expected his girlfriend's mother to make a marriage proposal on behalf of her daughter. Rochelle wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t even pressed the issue of marriage.

  “Yeah,” he found himself saying.

  Sharon was ecstatic, maybe more so than her teenage daughter bride and the bewildered groom-to-be.

  “We can make it a double wedding,” Sharon gushed. “You and Rochelle and me and Gary.”

  The plans had been made. Mother and daughter, estranged for years by miles, misunderstandings, and buckets of lies, were going to share something very special. Bart and Rochelle, Sharon and Gary, would be united in a double-wedding ceremony. Sharon was thrilled.

  Rochelle and Bart slept on the floor in the living room, the kids in their bedrooms, Sharon and Gary in the master bedroom. Gary stayed up there three nights in a row. When they woke, the morning they were to leave, Gary was gone. He had done it again. He went back to Nancy.

  Sharon dragged herself from the bedroom in tears. She was devastated by her abandonment. Who would not have felt sorry for her? After all she had been through, wasn’t she entitled to some happiness?

  “I'm going anyway,” she said.

  Rochelle and Bart exchanged wedding vows in the county clerk's office while Sharon and her youngest two children looked on. It was supposed to be her day, too. But Gary had left her high and dry.

  Gary was free, but aimless. He had skipped out on Sharon before their wedding, but he still didn’t know where he was going or what he would do when he got there. He just had to get away. He drove up to Denver to stay with some friends, but no one was home. He went to his grown daughter's house near Denver and visited with her all day. At one point, as he tried to figure out what to do, he slipped away and called the landlord of the rental home that he and Sharon had planned to lease, and asked if the place was still available.

  “No,” the landlord said, “the people are moving in right now.”

  Gary thanked him. He let out a deep sigh of relief. Sharon was moving in. She was not going to be cooling her heels waiting for him in Trinidad. He really was free.

  Gary drove south. And just like Sharon, he planned to start over.

  “I wanted Sharon out of Wet Canyon… out, away from me, away from Nancy, away from my son. Maybe it was a rotten thing to do, but I just couldn’t think of any other way. She had a power over me and I knew I had to break it. The best thing was to get her up to Denver. She’d have a job up there. She’d still have the money. Just away from me.”

  Back in the Canyon, folks had become used to the phantom neighbor. Sharon was home. She was gone. She moved to Denver. She moved to the Springs. She never stayed in any place very long. Some wondered if her coming and going had more to do with how they had treated her, than how she viewed her home.

  “She wanted to be a part of the community, I think,” said one of her neighbors. “A lot of people kind of ostracized her. It was always out of sight, out of mind.”

  Bart Mason had just left Robinson's sawmill when he saw Gary Adams’ familiar pickup truck. The nerve of that little guy showing up in the Canyon! Rochelle's husband was still bitter over how Gary had dumped Sharon, jilting her nearly at the altar. Bart positioned his truck across the roadway in a fashion that blocked both lanes. The two men got out of their trucks.

  “You fucking pussy!” Bart yelled at his former beer buddy, his former defacto in-law.

  Gary shrugged sheepishly.

  The response only brought forth more ire from the hotheaded younger man.

  “You’re a fucking coward!” Bart yelled.

  “I know, Bart,” Gary said, clearly taken aback. He was obviously sorry that he’d run into Bart. He was also sorry that he had left Sharon in such a bad way. He just didn’t want to divorce the mother of his son.

  “I'm sorry. I just couldn’t leave Nancy.”

  BOOK III

  Fireman’s Wife

  “I’ve known half a dozen guys who have helped her get wood or done ditch work, but everybody would hold her at arm's length because of the opinion of what had gone on. “

  —Bob Robinson, Weston resident

  “It seemed like all of a sudden she got real greedy. It was buy, buy, buy.”

  —Rochelle Fuller, Sharon's daughter

  Chapter 21

  THE FAMILIAR HIGH-PITCHED, RED METAL ROOF rose in front of the windshield as Glen Trainor turned off the highway in little Walsenburg, Colorado. Next to McDonald's famed golden arches, few restaurants were so recognizable as the Pizza Hut. Sharon Nelson Harrelson knew the restaurant well. She and Gary Adams had been there before, as had her children. One time when she was sneaking out for the thrill of “dining and dashing,” the former preacher's wife was caught by some pimply faced kid and hauled back inside to pay her meal bill
.

  It was a place full of memories. It had been such a place for Perry Nelson, too. Once when Perry and Julie were going through the motions of holding their tattered marriage together after Sharon had left for Texas, Perry started crying uncontrollably at the Pizza Hut.

  “This is where Sharon and I used to go…I can’t stand to be here anymore,” he said to his heartsick wife. “This is where she told me good-bye.”

  The Walsenburg Pizza Hut was the place where Sharon Nelson took her pointy heels and stomped on his heart like a Mexican hat dance.

  The Thornton detective, along with his partner Elaine Tygart, still didn’t know what Sharon was going to confide when she asked them to drive there. Though they had no time to talk about it, both cops had the feeling the woman with the bunched-up Kleenex and smeared lipstick was going to inform them who had killed her husband, fireman Glen Harrelson. She knew something. Tygart and Trainor were sure of that. Somehow Sharon was up to her pretty eyeballs in it.

  “I'm tired of living a lie,” she had said back in Trinidad before they drove the forty miles to Walsenburg.

  Even though Sharon indicated she knew the truth would set her free, she was still quite frightened. At least, she had said so many times. She cried and gasped for air. She was so scared.

  Of what? The police? A boyfriend? Who, Sharon? Who?

  Det. Glen Trainor made a brief phone call to his captain in Thornton.

  “She's going to talk,” Trainor said. “Send some people down here.”

  Done. In a few minutes a posse would be sent for Sharon. The captain told Trainor to arrest her.

  Advised of her rights and the little waiver signed, Sharon slid into the dark folds of a Naugahyde booth, while Danny and Misty were given a fistful of quarters to play arcade games in front of the restaurant. Neither child appeared to be aware their world was changing forever. Sharon knew she was in trouble. The silence she had maintained in front of her children en route to Walsenburg was about to end.

  She knew she could go to jail.

  “It all started a long time ago,” she began as if she were about to launch into a bedtime story. She started slowly, carefully. Words were chosen one at a time, giving her sentences a cadence that suggested worry and uncertainty. She told the detectives how she and her husband Perry had tax and financial obligations that were consuming their marriage. No marriage is easy, she said, but one with money problems can be doomed from the start.