Sex. Murder. Mystery(18)

Years later, Blanche Wheeler shook her head at the memory.

“Some women with the school felt it was probably the other way around,” she said.

Back at the medical building in Rocky Ford, front-desk assistant Iona Hamilton did her best to avoid Sharon whenever the hot-to-trot preacher’s wife was “helping out” in Rocky Ford instead of at Dr. Nelson’s Trinidad practice. Though Iona wasn’t even a member of the conservative Adventist church, she knew damn well the difference between right and wrong.

Some of the other, the younger, women in the office seemed oblivious to Sharon’s actions, and when Iona was unable to bite her tongue, they chided her for being “mean” to misunderstood Sher.

“You just don’t like her, because you know Julie,” a young clerk said one afternoon.

“No,” Iona shot back, no longer able to hold herself in complete check. “I feel there’s an evil streak in the woman.”

The clerk pooh-poohed Iona’s remark, but the strong-minded front-desk assistant stood her ground.

“Someday, you’ll see,” she said. “She’s not the person she pretends to be. She wants everyone to like her, too much. I think there’s an ulterior motive here.”

And so it went on. Lovers as wrapped up as Perry and Sharon were thought they could keep their rendezvous hush-hush. Some secret. Just about everybody in town knew the two of them were carrying on. The looks. The unnecessary running into each other. They even had a hiding place at the Watkins Medical Arts building in which they squirreled away notes to one another.

Perry showed Barb Ruscetti several of the lovesick missives Sharon had left for him.

“Look what my doll left for me today,” he said.

Barb regarded the love note. It was akin to the kind of little message a teenager would write to another to pass the lagging minutes in geometry class. What was this man thinking?

“Oh, Doctor,” Barb pleaded, “you ought to let this go. It’s ruining your life.”

Perry folded up the paper and slipped it back into the pocket of his trousers. Barb just didn’t understand. He would never give up the preacher’s wife.

“I don’t want to live without her. I’m going to marry her, Barb.”

Barb didn’t know what to say. Doctor’s spellbound, he-witched by a big-boobed siren, she thought. God help him. God help Julie.

Mike Fuller was not his sister-in-law Judy’s favorite person. He was controlling, selfish and demanding. There was a distance that she could not overcome, even if she had wanted to become closer. He was the preacher, and that alone, given the Douglas sisters’ growing-up years, was a black mark against him. In all fairness, Judy Douglas would later concede much of what she knew of Mike Fuller’s character and temperament was from her sister’s less-than-glowing accounts of their marriage. Even so, Judy felt guilty, and later a little used when Sharon would drive up to her house in Colorado Springs to rendezvous with Dr. Nelson.

“I knew Sharon played around in her marriage to Mike. Everyone probably knew. I knew that she told Mike that she was coming up to see one of my children who had been very ill with spinal meningitis. It was usually on a Saturday after church. I didn’t know the details of Sharon’s relationship with Perry. She’d come over, say hello and they’d go off to a motel.”

It was no wonder the home owned by Karl and Blanche Wheeler was a beehive of activity in September 1976. Blanche double-checked and triple-checked the foot-long list she kept detailing all that needed to be done for their daughter’s September 5th wedding. As if there wasn’t enough to do. Blanche pushed up her eyeglasses and let out a sigh, tempered with a smile. Running a dental business and taking care of the responsibilities associated with the forty-acre ranch southeast of Rocky Ford was never easy.

Calves in the summertime, melons and corn to harvest and a wedding, too.

The preparations for the nuptials, Blanche never once had to remind herself, were a labor of love. The other stuff life brought was just work.

When Sharon Fuller called to inquire if she could come to the Wheeler place to practice a song she was going to sing at the next Sabbath, Blanche told the younger woman to come over despite a house full of relatives and her list of things to do. That same day, Julie Nelson expected her husband to bring his RV over so the Wheelers could use it to put up some of their out-of-town relatives for the weekend. Julie telephoned that morning to let the Wheelers know Perry had left and was bringing along a crate of peaches.

Later that the afternoon, Sharon arrived wearing her trademark short-shorts and planted herself in front of the piano. She said she was so grateful Blanche had let her intrude during such a frenzied time. Sharon felt a little more practice and the song, “A Hill Called Mount Calvary,” would be perfect.