Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “I’m not sleeping with her. Bill the guy who is,” he said tersely. Though the words were meant to jab, there was something in Perry’s voice that suggested the effort had been wasted. Barb could hear it: Perry still loved Sharon.

  The dreaded F-word. Like most everybody else, Barbara Ruscetti had heard the word more often than she cared to. But never in almost two decades of employment had she heard Dr. Nelson utter such coarse vulgarities. When he came in the office swearing a blue streak, peppered with “F this” and “F that,” she stood her ground.

  “You don’t use that word around me,” Barb said, feeling glad that despite everything, she could still tell the doc what was on her mind. “Maybe you use it around Sharon, but you don’t use it around me.”

  Perry shot her a classic “who me?” look.

  His disinterest in her feelings irritated Barb even more.

  “Just knock it off,” she said, brushing the wisps of her cinnamon-bun hairdo from her reddened face.

  “Don’t get your tits in an uproar,” Perry said, when he finally got the message the woman he had depended on for so many years was not enjoying the new and improved Dr. Nelson.

  “I will. You’re not talking to me like that.” Barb shot him an uncharacteristic glare. “I’m not going to stand for it.”

  Perry shrugged an apology, but didn’t clean up his act. He had never been a saint, but Sharon’s influence had dragged him down lower than a sewer line. Barb hated what she saw, but there was nothing to do about it. She was torn. She not only loved her job, she needed it. She could only hope that Perry would shape up. She couldn’t quit. Barb Ruscetti was stuck.

  “I never heard him say one bad word until Sharon. And then, I mean it was like he was full of the devil,” Barb said, trying to come to terms with her beloved boss’ dark transformation. “He just did a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might say. He turned from good to bad.”

  Perry, no longer the occasional-beer Seventh-Day Adventist that he had been when he was with put-upon first wife Julie, took to the bottle as his fortunes and personal life began to snowball into the biggest mess in southern Colorado. Who could blame him? His new wife—the cause of his ruin in the eyes of so many—had left him for his good friend, Buzz Reynolds. Yet many were left to wonder: What had he expected when he married Sharon? Did he really think that she would be true to him? Or he to her, for that matter?

  The doctor sought solace from the bottle.

  One time Barb pulled Dr. Nelson aside when she detected the boozy odor coating the slurred words of his speech.

  “Perry,” she said, calmly masking her horror, but being as direct as she could be, “you can’t come in here like this. Patients won’t like it. They can smell it, too.”

  He shrugged and turned away.

  As the optometry business continued to fall off, Barb’s paychecks were often delayed. With only the Trinidad office open, Perry had expected patients from Rocky Ford to make the trip to town to see him. They didn’t. One week Barb collected only $14 in receipts. There had been no glasses to dispense. No exams to give. No nothing. People just didn’t want a thing to do with the Nelsons. Sharon once insisted that if Perry’s office offered Visa and MasterCard as a billing option, more customers would come.

  But, of course, plastic money made no difference. The problem had never been with Dr. Nelson’s patients and their pocketbooks.

  Mixed in with the anger and bitterness, Barb couldn’t help but feel a measure of sorrow for her employer. She frequently overheard Dr. Nelson talking with his banker as he sought to delay loan payments. The figures were staggering to the woman who put her children through school on crocheted booties and a small salary. Dr. Nelson owed $120,000 on the mountain house. The IRS was due more than $100,000; the State of Colorado, $80,000 in back taxes and penalties. Various lens labs around the country were due between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece.

  Perry Nelson was in so deep he needed a snorkel to breathe.

  One morning, not long before his Bronco was about to be repossessed by the dealership because he could no longer keep up on the payments, the doctor came into the office looking disheveled and wan.

  Barb met him at the door. “What’s the matter, Doctor?”

  “Oh, Barb,” he said quietly, “I’m going to end it all.”

  “You don’t mean that, do you? You remember what my grandmother would say.”

  The comment brought a smile to his haggard face. Barb Ruscetti was always talking about the advice her grandmother had doled out.

  “What’s that?”

  “You die, Perry, you go straight to hell.”

  Perry let out a weak laugh. “I’m going there anyway,” he said.

  The rest of the morning Barb kept her eye on him. He wasn’t stable and she was worried. At lunch, she closed the office and went to see a friend of Perry’s. She told the man that she thought Perry might be considering suicide. The friend said he’d go see his pal as soon as he finished his work.

  “No,” she said somewhat desperately, “you ought to go now.”

  The friend found Perry Nelson in his Bronco with a loaded revolver. Tears had striped shiny tracks down his face and his hands trembled.

  But he had not pulled the trigger.

  “Perry, you gotta hang in there. Things will get better. They really will,” the friend said. ”I promise. Things will get better.”

  Though the kind words seemed to calm the eye doctor and avert tragedy, the friend was dead wrong.

  Things would never get better.

  It was the kind of Christmas surprise no husband wanted. Perry Nelson looked shell-shocked. Sharon had hit him with an announcement that sent him deeper into the bottle. He had invited her up to the mountain house for Christmas with Misty and Danny, some gifts, some dinner, and if he was lucky enough, a chance at a reconciliation. Sharon, however, had another agenda. She told him that she couldn’t come back to him. She was carrying Buzz Reynolds’ baby.

  She cried how it was not her fault. Cross her heart and hope to die, it was an accident.

  Perry called his estranged wife every name in the book. He told her she was a whore and a slut and if she wanted to have Buzz’s baby so damn bad, she ought to get a divorce and get on with it. If she ever wanted to come back into his life, she’d better get an abortion.

  “I’m not raising no one else’s child!” he yelled.

  A couple of days later at the office, Dr. Nelson was in another of his fit-to-be-tied moods. He didn’t have a nice word for anyone. He had three pairs of glasses that needed to be repaired, and instead of working on them himself, he threw them in a tangled mass on Barb Ruscetti’s desk. His abruptness startled her. She looked up from her work.

  “You send these out to get fixed,” he said loudly.

  Barb studied the glasses. “Whose are they?” she asked.

  The doctor’s face went red. Barb could see the thermometer that was his anger threshold rise twenty degrees.

  “You don’t have to know whose they are. I just said for you to send them in and fix the damn things.”

  Barb stood up, her tiny stature dwarfed by Perry’s six-foot-plus frame. “Pardon me for breathing,” she snapped at his back as he retreated to a back room.

  Dr. Nelson’s attack was so out of character; even when he’d been boozing at the tavern, he wasn’t a mean drunk.

  She asked what was wrong.

  Again, Dr. Nelson’s tone was off-putting. He was loud and harsh as he spat out his words. “Just don’t bother me. Just leave me alone. Don’t even talk to me!”

  Barb backed off. A couple of hours later, the optometrist slumped himself onto the lobby couch. It was time to talk.

  “What in the hell is eating you?” she finally asked. “What did I do for you to holler at me like that?’’

  Perry Nelson buried his handsome, salt-and-pepper bearded face into the palms of his big hands and started to cry. Barb reached over to him, feeling sick to her stomach that her words had set him off.
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  “Barb,” he said, “tell me something. How would you feel if you found out that your wife was sleeping with your best friend and she was pregnant?”

  His words knocked the wind out her.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Sharon’s pregnant by Buzz.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said, feeling her words fall flat.

  Perry didn’t care. He’d said the same thing to Sharon that morning when she dropped the bomb.

  “No lie, Barb, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

  He told Barb he’d thrown the rest of Sharon’s clothes out on the porch that morning and told her never to come back.

  “What is she going to do?” Barb asked.

  “I really don’t care,” he said.

  After the Christmas holidays, Sharon begged Perry to let her come back home to the mountains. Things had not gone as well with Buzz as she had hoped. In fact, when she told her rancher/ lover she was pregnant, he booted her right out the door. Sharon whined how well-to-do Buzz Reynolds didn’t love her. Poor Sher. Her oldest two children were living in the Midwest with their minister father; her two youngest in Round House with their father. Perry had told his round-heeled wife to get lost. Sharon had no money. No one liked her. She hit rock bottom and moved into a seedy apartment in Rocky Ford.

  “The rent’s around ninety dollars a month,” Perry told Barb one afternoon when he gave her the latest Sharon Nelson Update.

  “What kind of place does she have that only costs ninety dollars a month?”

  Perry made a face that slipped into a slight smile. “It isn’t in a very good part of town.”

  “I didn’t know Rocky Ford was big enough to have a bad part of town,” Barb said.

  The doctor nodded. “Oh, yeah, it’s not very nice.”

  Those who remained close to Dr. Nelson knew that when he said he didn’t give a hoot about daughter Lorri’s wedding, he was the biggest liar in the Rocky Mountain State. His youngest daughter by Julie had been nothing but trouble and just because she had gotten herself pregnant was no reason to break out the brass band and dance at her wedding. Though he seemed adamant in his refusal to go to Montana, most suspected another person was the real reason. Sharon had never made a secret of her disgust with Lorri since the incident at the Adventist academy in Loveland:

  “She’s no good. She’s got no respect for anybody!”

  Barb Ruscetti couldn’t believe Perry was in his right mind when he said he wouldn’t attend the wedding.

  “This can bring you back together,” Barb insisted. “If you don’t go, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  Perry was nearly moved to tears when he finally agreed to go. His life had been full of regrets. He had given up so much… but despite the brainwashing by his knocked-up-by-his-former-best-friend estranged wife, he still loved his “favorite youngest” daughter. He took almost four-year-old Danny, leaving Misty with Sharon and he drove north to Montana. It was a Rocky Mountain soap opera in southeastern Colorado and he was glad to get away. His relief was short-lived. When he arrived in Billings, he was stomping-feet mad at himself— he had lost his wallet and $500 at a rest stop on the way.

  The reunion between father and daughter exceeded both their expectations. As the two got reacquainted, it was evident to Lorri that her father was still deeply troubled by his shattered second marriage. He still loved Sher, he said, but he could no longer look the other way and forgive her. As Lorri probed, her father told her about Sharon’s pregnancy by old pal Buzz Reynolds.

  “It’s over,” Perry said bitterly. “This time, I swear to God it’s over for good. I kicked her out and I want nothing, to do with her ever again.”

  As he walked Lorri down the aisle on February 21, 1982, in one of those god-awful rented taupe tuxes, Perry Nelson smiled warmly and proudly. And while the moment could not have been happier for the pretty young bride, she saw something in her dad that she had never seen before: sadness in his eyes.

  Judy Douglas had always been pro-choice when it came to abortion and a woman’s right to take responsibility for her body. Yet in Judy’s estimation, her younger sister’s repeated abortions made Sharon the poster girl for forces seeking to restrict the procedure. Sharon had terminated at least five pregnancies that her sister knew about, maybe more during the years when the sisters were estranged.

  “She used to stop by on her way to Denver, on her way to get an abortion. It was very casual for Sharon,” Judy recalled several years later.

  At the time of Sharon’s pregnancies from her myriad Colorado lovers, Judy knew better than trying to convince her birth control might be a good idea, given her history of promiscuity and obvious fertility. Sharon wanted to get pregnant.

  “She had some strange romantic idea about pregnancy and her affairs. I never understood it. I never will.”

  Sharon’s attitude about her abortion repulsed Barb Ruscetti when Sharon told her about it back in Trinidad. She was so perfunctory about it. It was nothing at all. An inconvenience. Sharon told Barb that she was almost five months pregnant when she aborted Buzz’s baby up in a Denver clinic. She confided to Barb that she told the doctors the baby’s father had serious heart trouble.

  As Sharon rambled on, Barb could feel her pulse quicken.

  Oh, my God. People would die to have a baby and look what she did.

  Springtime in the Rockies is the kind of magnificent season that inspires weekend painters to bring their easels alongside creek beds flanked by mountains still dipped in white. Green shoots bust through the crust of crunchy snow, reminding observers winter finally has been shoved aside by the forces of a sweeter-tempered Mother Nature. Colorado springtimes are times for renewal.

  Sharon Nelson bought into that; at least, to many who knew her, it seemed that she did. After unleashing every ugly word she could conjure, about everything from their sex life to his table manners to his undershorts, she finally took a breather and stopped bad-mouthing Perry. After seven months of sleeping with her estranged husband’s supposed best pal, Sharon set her sights on returning to her beloved Round House. She told friends she had tired of Buzz Reynolds, of living off and on in the fleabag apartment in Rocky Ford. No one knew how she did it, but somehow Sharon charmed her way back into Perry Nelson’s good graces. Whatever it was that she did to win men over, it had to be pretty good. Dr. Nelson acted as though he had never stopped loving her. It was as if she had been on a vacation or out of town nursing a sick relative back to health. The pregnancy, the betrayal, the bile-coated words had never taken place.

  Outwardly the doctor was all smiles.

  Sharon’s return to Perry, however, only brought additional heartache to the doctor’s daughters and friends. All they had seen when Sharon first entered Perry’s life was the ruin of everything he had built, everything the man had stood for. No one, not even his daughters, considered the man a saint, but they knew him to be caring, honest and trustworthy. All of that had changed when Sharon Fuller came into his life. God, they hoped, they prayed, the woman would be gone for good. In time, the man would come around. In time, Sharon’s spell would fade. In time, Perry would stop drinking, stop smoking, stop carrying on like some lust-crazed teenager whose zipper was forever stuck open.

  The prayers went unanswered. Sharon made her move toward reconciliation with her husband on their son’s fourth birthday, the first week in March of 1982.

  When her father answered the phone he put up a brave front, but Lorri could tell something was wrong.

  “Dad, what is it?” she asked.

  “Guess you’ll find out,” he said cautiously, as if confessing to a capital crime. “Sharon and I are working things out. We’re getting back together. The divorce is being called off.”

  Lorri could barely believe her ears. She had rejoiced a dozen times since her wedding that Sharon was now another man’s problem, had been so sure Sharon was gone for good.

  “Dad, she got pregnant by another man! By your friend!�
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  Perry explained all of it had already been handled. He’d paid for an abortion and Sharon’s pregnancy was no longer an issue.

  “She’s the mother of my children, Lorelco. I let one family slip away. I’m not about to make the same mistake twice.”

  Lorri tried to get him to see the light as he had so clearly demonstrated at her wedding when he said he was through with Sharon, but there was no arguing with him over the phone. Lorri pressed the point as hard as she could without angering her father. She didn’t want to risk another separation over Sharon.

  ”I love her,” he said, almost sadly, before saying goodbye.

  Lorri hung up the phone in shock. She slumped her numb body into a kitchen chair while reason ran a merry-go-round in her head.

  Why, Dad? Why are you going back to her? What makes you so blind to what other so clearly see—what you had seen yourself? she thought.

  Not long after the Nelsons reunited, Sharon accompanied Perry back to Cedar Lake, Michigan, to help celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. And though Perry told friends he was happy that things had worked out, Sharon was not so happy. She complained bitterly that Perry only wanted her back in his life “to be his maid.” He didn’t love her, Sharon raged, he only wanted to use her.

  Funny thing, up and down the spring thaw-swollen canyons others were saying the same thing about her. Some scratched their heads at the motivation of the doctor’s reconciliation with his wife.

  “Don’t underestimate the power of pussy,” one wise old-timer remarked. “Nothing on this earth can compete.”

  Sharon Fuller Nelson understood the power better than anyone and as the warmth of the Colorado spring moved to the scorching heat of the summer, she put her secret weapon to good and frequent work.

  There was a method to her madness.

  For Candis Thornton, being friendly with Sharon Nelson was both easy and hard. It was easy, because Sharon could be so much fun. She was quick with a quip, always up for doing something with a group, eager to fit in. No matter what was said about her, there were times when she was easy to like. During the time when Sharon had left Perry, the two saw each other infrequently. But when Sharon came back into her estranged husband’s life, she seemed to try to foist herself back on the people of Weston. She wanted to be a part of the community. She seemed to crave the connection between herself and the others of Weston. Sadly—at least, for her—she didn’t really fit in.