Sex. Murder. Mystery(26)

“This hurts,” she sobbed. “Please get them out! Take them out!”

For some reason, Sharon just sat there. So Barb got up and helped the girl.

“I don’t want these,” the girl said, tears still running down her cheeks. “They hurt.”

Sharon stood up like a rocket.

“You’re nothing but a damn baby! I won’t even bother with you.” She turned on her heels and advised Barb that if she wanted to dispense the lenses, it was fine with her.

“I’m not even going to bother with her!”

Then she disappeared into a back office.

The young husband shot a glare in Sharon’s direction and told Barb they didn’t have to take that kind of abuse from anyone.

“Mrs. Ruscetti,” he said, “this doesn’t pertain to you, but none of my family will ever come back to this office as long as she’s here.”

And they never did.

As much as she enjoyed the full freedom of the office, at least as it had been in the days before Sharon, Barb Ruscetti began to hate to leave her desk. It seemed that every time she did, she’d return to find Sharon rifling papers, going through files and generally poking her nose into every piece of paperwork she could get her hands on.

As the guerrilla attacks on the office files continued, no matter how often Barb asked Sharon to cool it, she’d laugh it off. Tension increased. Sharon was pushing Barb’s buttons with reckless abandon.

“What are you looking for?” Barb asked, as Sharon bent over and fanned out some files from a bottom drawer. Caught, Sharon stood up, her skirt still clinging halfway up her thigh.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Then get the hell out from behind my desk or I’ll throw you out the damn window!”

Sharon smiled and moved out of the way.

Barb wished she had pushed her out. In the long run, it probably would have been an act of mercy for so many.





Chapter 8

SHARON’S EYES HAD TURNED FROM BLUE TO red. Her prettily painted mouth was a taut gash of lipstick and anger. If she was a bitch on wheels, as Barb Ruscetti had characterized her during their first encounter, that morning in Perry Nelson’s Trinidad office she was running the Indy 500. She had heard more bad news: Now Mike was seeking full, permanent custody of Rochelle and Denise in Otero County Superior Court. When she arrived to tell Perry about it, she stomped her heels like a petulant child and flung obscenities about the room like boomerangs welded of steak knives. One after another sliced through the air. Sharon seemed to pay no mind that patients could hear her tirade. She cared nothing about anyone. Sharon Fuller was, as Barb could see, the center of her own universe. And she was fit to be tied. “That fucker! That fucker can’t do this to me!”

Barb was aghast. This was Dr. Nelson’s office, not a miners’ pool hall. She tried to understand Sharon’s bitterness. She tried very hard. Each time she went to the place in her heart where she could retrieve sympathy for others, she came up with nothing for the woman slamming things around the office and using every dirty name in the book against her husband. The minister’s estranged wife was not going to get any support from her. She had done her husband dirtier than any woman Barb had ever seen, heard about, read about. She was vile and evil. Sharon had lost her children because she was a neglectful mother. The two little girls were better off without her.

“Perry, call the goddamn judge in La Junta and put a stop to this. You know him! Call him now!”

Perry stepped back from Sharon’s screaming mouth and slowly shook his head.

“No,” he said, quietly but with considerable firmness. “This is between you and Mike. I’m staying out of it.”

Sharon grabbed for the phone. In a minute she was on the line screaming at the top of her lungs to the unlucky court employee who picked up the line.

“Don’t fuck with me and my girls!” Sharon raged into the mouthpiece. “They’re my girls! Mike can’t have them!”

After she vented her anger for what had to be only a few seconds, but seemed much longer, the line went dead. Enraged at being disconnected by some two-bit clerk, Sharon threw the phone halfway across the back office. It clattered against the floor.

“I’ll show that son of a bitch! If he thinks he’s going to take my girls away from me! I’m not going to lose my daughters! They’re mine! Mine!`

A few weeks later, Perry pulled Barb aside in the office to tell her what had happened when Sharon went to court to hammer out a final joint-custody agreement with her former husband.

“Oh Barb, it was something else,” Perry said one afternoon when Sharon was not around.