“Wonder what's keeping him?” Bob asked.
“He’ll be home soon enough,” Sharon said. She switched on the news and waited for the weather report.
Another hour elapsed.
When the TV weatherman reported Denver had experienced heavy rains, Sharon snapped up his words. She suggested her husband had been delayed by the storm, perhaps even in a car accident related to the nasty weather. Maybe he had car trouble and stopped at Sharon's sister's place in Colorado Springs?
As Sharon prattled on, she casually dropped a bomb.
“Bob, I don’t believe you’ll ever see your friend Perry again.”
The statement brought the room to silence. The television was clicked on “Mute.”
“What do you mean?” Bob asked.
Sharon played with her drink, and looked into the glass. Ice cubes clinked.
“It's just a feeling, I don’t know,” she said.
Donna continued to wish they’d never come to Weston. She had not wanted to visit in the first place. She wanted to go to Denver. Even in small doses, Sharon bugged her. Perry's wife seemed to be solely fixed on sex and men. Whenever they went to town, she’d sashay and wink at men in the grocery store or the gas station.
That evening, Sharon's conversation and actions bothered Donna more than usual. She was always irritating, but during one conversation in the master bedroom was particularly unsettling. Sharon sat on the edge of her bed.
“What would you do if your husband didn’t come home one day?” Sharon asked her.
Donna shook her head. “Bob wouldn’t leave.”
“But what if he did?”
The reluctant guest stared hard at her hostess.
“That could never happen,” she said firmly.
Sharon persisted and Donna finally sighed out an answer. “I’d go on and make a life for my children.”
It was almost as if Sharon didn’t hear the answer.
“Well, what would you do if Bob just disappeared?” she persisted.
Exasperated, Donna enunciated every word as clearly as possible. “I’d keep on living and make my life as good as I could for my children.”
Donna nudged her husband when Sharon got up for another drink.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” she said.
After 10 P.M., the Goodheads, still worried that Perry hadn’t made it home, left for their motel room in Trinidad.
The next morning, the Goodheads returned to find Sharon assisting Harry Russell, a six-foot-six and 350-pound Peterbilt truck of a man, with the brake lines on his old truck. It was a job, Sharon explained to the Goodheads, that Perry had promised to do.
“Where's Perry?” Bob Goodhead asked.
“He hasn’t made it home yet. He’ll be home any minute.”
“Something is wrong, Sharon,” Bob said, shaking his head with worry. “Let's go call the Denver Tech Center.”
The four of them went down to Al Robinson's mill to use the phone. No one they called knew anything of Perry Nelson's whereabouts in Denver. A doctor from Rocky Ford was certain that he hadn’t seen Perry at all. No one had seen him. Perry, as far as that man knew, had never even made it to Denver.
Bob Goodhead put his hand on Sharon's shoulder.
“Call the highway patrol,” he said.
When Sharon got off the phone she explained that the authorities had no record of a wreck involving a black VW bug.
The Goodheads gave Sharon their AT&T telephone credit card so she could continue to call from the pay phone. She seemed agitated, deeply concerned about her husband. She spoke in rapid-fire sentences, words strung together tighter than a pearl necklace. She was either crying or on the verge of it.
By dinnertime that evening, the Goodheads finally had to leave. Sharon was drunk and sputtering imbecilic statements about her husband's legion of enemies. There was nothing more they could do. They gave Sharon their telephone credit card and drove to Denver. All the way there, they studied the roadside for traces of Perry and his black VW.
When Bob Goodhead checked in for his class schedule, he inquired whether Perry Nelson had done so as well. The convention registrar indicated that, in fact, while Perry had signed up for the class on Pharmaceuticals—he had not shown up. He had not confirmed that he was there.
Bob feared the worst: Perry must have been in an auto accident.
That same evening, they shared their concerns as they drove away.
“Something isn’t right here,” Bob told Donna. “Sharon knows something. I’ve got a funny feeling about this… she knows more than she's letting on.”
Donna agreed, while her husband went on.
“I don’t think a worried wife is going to throw a drunk,” he said. “And what's all this talk about enemies? That's the biggest lie I’ve ever heard in my life. Everyone loves Perry. He's the kind of guy that if someone had a flat tire, he’d stop and fix it for them. People love that guy.”