Sex. Murder. Mystery

Chapter 1

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FRESH START. GOD KNEW the preacher’s thirty-year-old wife needed one. So did her husband. Four years in Durham, North Carolina, had been besmirched by the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Nerves had been frayed. Blame had been heaped deeper and deeper. No man’s shoulders could bear the enormous weight of it all. Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor Mike Fuller knew he had a problem. A pretty one, too. Her name was Sharon.

The family headed west to La Junta and Rocky Ford, Colorado, boiling over the circumstances forcing them from the eastern seaboard. It was the summer of 1976; platform shoes’ last stand, the year of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. For the family in the convertible sliding across the mammoth asphalt belt of the interstate, it was not a happy time. The house they loved had been put up for sale; furniture loaded on a separate moving truck. Friends had been kissed good-bye. The couple’s two little girls, Rochelle, seven, and Denise, two, had been yanked from their playmates.

And it was all her fault.

Sharon Fuller had fallen in love with a man in her husband’s congregation. It was not the first time and, Sharon knew, it likely would not be the last. Within the embrace of the other man’s arms, Sharon told friends, she had found compassion, tenderness, love—emotions she derisively insisted her husband was incapable of offering.

The scenario played in Sharon’s mind like a bodice-ripper romance novel without a happy ending. Tattered dreams. Lost opportunity. Star-crossed lovers. To her way of thinking, such a romantic visage seemed to fit her predicament. Her voice would waver many years later when she would try to dissect what had happened when she had forsaken her husband for a man named Craig.

“It wasn’t so much that our marriage was bad at that point. Mike was never a sensitive person. He’d never been one to share like Rod McKuen poems. I’ll never forget the first time I went over to Craig’s apartment. He had a fantastic stereo system and he had a tape—he had lots of tapes—of Rod McKuen. One of them was The Jostling of Angels and it just struck me so,” she said, the bitter sweetness of the memory bringing a smile to her face. “It was like it was talking about me. The feeling I got was when you’re so self-sufficient and self-important and you’re walking down the street… be careful that your imaginary wings don’t jostle the real angels that are the common people.”

She could picture her husband walking down the street, his imaginary wings “mashing everybody in his way.” She felt Minister Mike considered himself a “legend in his own mind” and did not understand that there were “real people out there that he knocked around emotionally that had real worth.”

Her lover had been different. Craig was gentle. Not just during sex, but in everything he did. He had a tenderness that drew Sharon closer than she had been with any man. When little Rochelle Fuller’s teddy bear was falling apart, it was Craig who brandished a Band-Aid for the stuffed animal. Sharon felt Mike would have tossed the torn plush toy into a trash bin. Craig had a gentle heart. A man with an easy touch. He was everything she had ever wanted; at least, she told herself so at the time. Sharon always told herself so. Whenever. Whoever. The man she slept with was always the man of her dreams.

Even as they drove across the flat expanses of the Great Plains, thoughts of Craig brought a sentimental smile to her lips, only to be obliterated by Mike’s contemptuous comments about the reason the church had sent them packing for the Rocky Mountain State. Her mind fixated on the day Mike told her they’d be moving.

“We’re being kicked out because you’re a little slut, Sharon!”

His eyes telescoped from their sockets. The veins on his neck bulged with blood.

“A slut!”

Sharon had hurried to Craig’s sister’s house in tears. The humiliation had ripped her apart; her nerves were shot, her eyes were red. Though she did not regret the love she and Craig shared, the bliss they had stolen, she could not erase the feelings of guilt and shame.

Craig’s sister put her arms around the sobbing preacher’s wife.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Sharon said.

At first, the woman didn’t know what she was talking about.

“They kicked us out because I am a slut!” Sharon ranted.

The woman tried to comfort her. “No, Sharon. No,” she said with exaggerated certainty. She told Sharon how church leaders had brought a petition calling for Mike Fuller’s removal as pastor of their church. Her husband, in fact, had signed it. Everyone knew about it. Sharon’s affair with Craig had not even been mentioned.