Sex. Murder. Mystery(4)
“Mike and Sharon seemed like a nice average couple,” Julie Nelson said later. “They had two little girls, age two and five, at the time and they seemed like a happy family. I didn’t know there were any problems in the marriage. I thought Sharon was friendly. I guess I liked her.”
Others weren’t so inclined. The Wheelers left the informal dinner party feeling a bit odd about the new woman in town. As they drove from Rocky Ford to their home in the country, Blanche Wheeler tried to put her finger on what it was about Sher Fuller that she didn’t like.
“I don’t know why,” Blanche said, “but I just felt uncomfortable around her.”
Karl Wheeler was a serious-minded man, raised on a Nebraska farm with good Midwestern values. He had also picked up on something unsettling. He stared straight ahead watching the road, listening to his wife. When she was finished, he blurted an answer.
“She’s out looking,” he said as he drove on into the night.
Blanche was puzzled. “Looking?”
“You know what I mean. For a man.”
When word got out the minister and his wife and children were stuck in a motel because their contractor had gone bankrupt, the invitations to dinner came with regularity. Some called. Some came to the church to offer a welcoming meal. The wife of a dentist found the Fullers’ motel unit by tracking down the door closest to the parked convertible with North Carolina plates.
The woman invited Sharon to spend the day baking, sewing, chatting. She took care of the little girls when Sharon and Mike needed to look for a place to live. When the dentist’s wife’s sister came to stay, she also met Sharon. The sister was a quiet woman, not given to uttering a negative word about anyone. But she didn’t like Sharon from the start.
After Mike came to take Sharon back to the motel, the two sisters gathered in the kitchen to talk.
“That woman is trouble,” the visiting sister said.
“What do you mean?”
“You just wait and see.”
The dentist’s wife was surprised by the remark. She probed for more, but her sister didn’t have a good answer. She hadn’t liked the minister’s wife. Not at all.
New blood was needed in Otero County, and Mike and Sharon Fuller had arrived in time for the transfusion. Perry Nelson also needed a boost. He found all of that, and more, in the minister’s attractive wife. The woman had a style, a kind of look that had not yet been quashed by the denim-and-boots uniform common among most gals who lived in the outposts of Colorado. Sharon wore her hair long, her dresses tight, her blouses unbuttoned one notch lower than a woman in her position likely had a right to. Even so, she did not overdo her makeup. In fact, beyond a touch of mascara, Sharon Fuller applied nothing more than a coating of lip gloss over cherry-flavored Chapstick. She didn’t have to bother.
Her message was in her motion. Sharon moved suggestively. Perry thought he could read something in her walk. Like a cat in heat, dragging herself along the ground for relief. Or maybe it was like a dancer who had been trained to use her body to communicate every nuance of desire? Sharon Fuller sauntered like a woman who held no doubt that all men watched her every move.
Maybe it was also the way she spoke; the way she licked her slickened lips as she contemplated a man from top to bottom, from his eyes to his size. The breathless timbre of her voice was also sweetened with the remnants of a Carolina accent.
That was Sharon. Sherry. Sher.
As the weeks passed, the Fullers moved from the Rocky Ford motel to a camping trailer near a local department store, to a little house five blocks from the Nelson residence. By then, the families had become good friends. There were veggie pizza dinners, shared baby-sitting, even camp-outs in the Nelson motor home in the midst of the splendor of the Spanish Peaks. Most of the conversation between the four adults revolved around the church, but even for Sharon that was better than nothing. She was a lonely woman in a town that she had a hard time taking a liking to. Mike had church duties and Sharon had the kids. There seemed to be nothing in between. The Nelson family was a godsend.
When Perry and Julie Nelson invited the Fullers to accompany them on a Memorial Day weekend camp-out in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, it was Sharon who readily accepted. The group departed immediately after church, planning to spend that night at a campground and hiking the next morning. Everyone was buoyant. It was a good weekend to leave Rocky Ford; the temperature was expected to hover just above one-hundred degrees.
Perry parked the motor home along a lazy creek; the air was fragrant with blooming wildflowers and cacti. It was as lovely as any place on earth. The beauty was not lost on Sharon, who found her appreciation for the desert deepen. While it was not North Carolina with its vast green hillsides, she could not deny it was awash with a life of its own.