How terrible for them. How awful to go through this kind of tragedy.
Yet if anyone offered a contrast to the dark mood, it continued to be Sharon herself.
Her behavior and attitude was at odds with the seriousness of the exploration. She seemed a little too happy. No one expected her to bawl like a baby. No one needed to see hand-wringing. Everyone knew Sharon and Perry had a marriage rife with arguments and estrangements.
The search party studied the black paint left on the guard rail. Sharon echoed what the police had told her on the previous trip to the site. She considered it conclusive proof the little car had gone over the bank at that point.
“Maybe he lost control and spun out?” someone asked.
Of course, no one knew.
When the bulk of the group drove ahead to pick up the searchers as they walked downstream, Sharon and Gary remained behind, inseparable.
“It seemed like an outing. She was too buoyant. It struck me that something wasn’t right. It was obvious something was going on between Gary and Sharon,” said a man who participated in the search.
After they could look no more, the group ate at Pizza Hut and drove back to Trinidad. Gary and Sharon went up to Round House and went to bed.
By the time everyone knew Perry was missing, the rumors his widow was shacked up with a carpenter named Gary Adams made it as far as Barbara Ruscetti's ears in Trinidad. She was appalled, but not surprised. When Perry came back—if he did come back—there would be hell to pay. Sharon had messed around with Buzz Reynolds, but Barb, for one, didn’t think her old boss would tolerate another.
This Gary Adams would be in big trouble, she thought.
Whenever Barb had the chance, she brought up Gary's name to see what others knew about him.
“Everybody said he was a real nice-looking man,” she said later. “Very easygoing, but everybody said, too, there's a real scary part of him. That he makes you afraid of him right away. That you don’t trust him.”
As much as she professed her love for her “Mountain Man,” Sharon wasted little time in making him over.
Gary Adams had never used hairspray in his entire life. He barely did more than wash and comb his brown hair into place. Yet Sharon had a manly beauty regimen for him. She actually blow-dried his hair and sprayed a style into place. There were bottles of lotions for his skin and a wardrobe of new clothes. She bought him skintight pants, she said, to show off every bulge to his advantage.
To her advantage, really. Sharon loved to look as much as she loved to touch.
Sharon, Gary once told a friend, tried to mold him into her ideal. Into the image of the man she wanted above all others. It seemed she desired a man that would screw her like something out of a pornographic movie in the morning and take her out for a fancy dinner in the evening. She had imagined a life of lusty class. She had the money coming in and the appetite for both. Everything was the best that money could buy.
Gary was there for the ride.
Beyond the sex, Sharon and Gary had few moments of bliss in their relationship. In fact, the longer they stayed in bed, the better they got along. The kids were the largest bone of contention, though other things got in the way, too.
When Gary tried to hook up a VCR, Sharon jumped into the process.
“No,” she said, in her know-it-all voice. “That's not the way you do it.”
Ten minutes passed. More hopelessly confused than ever, Sharon gave up as if Gary had so screwed up the cables that no one outside of a factory-trained representative from Sony could fix it.
“Just do your cooking and let me hook up the VCR,” Gary said bitterly, as Sharon left the room.
There were times when he wanted to smack her, too. If Perry ever hit Sharon, Gary could see why. In bed she was the best he’d ever had. But they could do that only so often. There were times when they actually had to talk or do other things. Those were the times when Sharon would make him mad.
And whenever it suited her, Sharon used sex to smooth things over with her lover.
“At times,” Gary Adams said years later, “she would use it as a peacemaker. If she thought I was really mad, she’d really come on with the charm… turn it on and off just like a water faucet. And other times, she could be as cold as ice toward me.”
Sharon also put off what needed to be done. It seemed to Gary that she’d rather play (preferably in bed) than do anything. Sometimes that was just fine with him, but when hauling water or getting supplies in town was necessary, it was frustrating.
“You must think ahead,” he kept telling her. “You can’t play all the time. You got to work at times.”
Sharon pooh-poohed his work-ethic. This was her turn to live a little. This was her time. Her dream. And if Gary didn’t like it, he could lump it.