Sex. Murder. Mystery(28)

Sharon did what she did best when it came to her children. She let them go. She let Mike have them.

* * *

Sharon was supposed to pay the bills at the office. It was such a joke. Sharon paid nothing. All the money that came into the business was hers. She was now the doctor’s wife and she was entitled to all the bucks that come with the title. She certainly wasn’t helping matters. Whenever there were two nickels in the till, she’d liberate the funds. She had made a practice of shopping in the mornings and coming back to the office to show Barb what she had purchased before leaving for lunch with her husband.

One day Barb got a nasty surprise when she got on the line to place an order for contact lenses with a Dallas manufacturer that had been doing business with the Nelson practice for years.

“Barb,” the account manager said before they could barely exchange the pleasantries that cross-country vendors and clients often do, “we can’t send you any more lenses until your bill is paid.”

“What do you mean? It’s paid the first of every month.”

“No, it hasn’t been paid in almost three months.”

Barb was at once embarrassed and angry. She knew the problem was that short-skirted woman with access to the office checkbook. She told Perry what the lensmaker had said.

Perry bristled at the implication.

“Barb, you’re out of your mind.”

“No, I’m not.”

Later, Barb learned Sharon had tired of paying the bills. It bored her. Rather than eat crow, Perry secretly took over the responsibility for the payables. He didn’t dare ask Barb to do it, though she would have. He didn’t want an ”I told you so.”

Sharon continued to help herself to the daily receipts. A few times when Barb went to cash her paycheck, the teller apologetically informed her that there wasn’t enough money in Dr. Nelson’s account to cover it. Money, Barb knew, was tight. Dr. Nelson had alimony, child support and a staggering debt load that needed major cash flow. If all corners were cut to a circle, maybe they’d get by. But not with what Sharon had in mind. It blew Barb’s mind when Dr. Nelson showed up with a thousand-dollar ring that Sharon had “bought” for him. For one thing, members of his church didn’t wear jewelry of any kind. With Sharon by his side, everything had gone out the window. When Sharon whined for a new dining-room set, three thousand dollars that the doctor didn’t have was somehow found to buy it.

Anything for Sharon.

Barb Ruscetti could see Dr. Nelson getting sucked in deeper and deeper and she knew the reason why.

“She was gorgeous. She was very busty, had a nice figure and this reddish-brown hair and she’s got blue eyes. Very beautiful and she really manipulated her men. She got whatever she wanted.”

Then the news came at the height of a hot August summer: Sharon was pregnant.

Around Christmas 1977, Julie Nelson returned to Colorado to help out with her daughter Kathy’s wedding at a church in Thornton. The former optometrist’s wife held her head up high and focused on the task at hand: making the wedding day perfect for her daughter. The fact that a very pregnant Sharon was there with her husband—just six months’ divorced—was a difficult pill to swallow. But Julie bit her tongue and did her best to keep any bitter feelings to herself.

“I’ve been so busy getting this wedding together,” Sharon told a Rocky Ford couple who had driven up to Denver for the occasion, ”I didn’t have time to get out any Christmas cards this year.”

Poor thing, and pregnant to boot!

When the remark made it to Julie’s ears back in the church’s basement kitchen, she tried to come up with an excuse for her rival.

“Maybe she meant she had been so busy making her dress or something,” she said.

Blanche Wheeler didn’t think so.

“She wore that dress at the office Christmas party.”

“Well, maybe I should just take it as a compliment. Maybe she wants to take credit for it because it turned out so nice.”

Three months later, in the first week in March, Sharon gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. A few who did the math, including Julie, were certain the baby was no preemie. Sharon had probably been pregnant when she and Perry married.

Had to be a reason for that quick-draw wedding in New Mexico.

Sharon didn’t care about the rumors. She simply crowed over the obvious.

“At least I gave Perry a son. Julie only had daughters,” she said.

Baby Danny Nelson quickly became the apple of his father’s eye.

“There was no man prouder or happier than Perry when they brought that little boy home. I’ll tell you, I thought the marriage just might work out. They seemed so thrilled,” said a friend of the family.