Sex. Murder. Mystery(71)
Chapter 20
EVEN WITH A BANK ACCOUNT FATTER THAN A SIDE of Nebraska beef, Sharon still liked to sneak into the movies or away from restaurants without paying. She did it two or three times at Pizza Hut, until an employee confronted her in the parking lot.
“You didn’t pay your bill,” the young employee said.
Sharon feigned shock. “Oh, didn’t I? I'm sorry, I forgot.”
When Sharon and Gary enjoyed a little getaway in Las Vegas, Sharon cajoled Gary into skipping out on a $30 dinner bill at an Italian restaurant.
“Sharon liked the rush. She liked the adventure,” Gary once told a friend, though he didn’t think much of his lover's choices when it came to adventure. “If you’re going to do something, do something big,” Gary advised. “The rest of it— always be straight. If you’re going to be a criminal, hit a bank, don’t rob 7-Eleven.”
Teenager Rochelle Fuller was the spitting image of her mother. She had thick, dark hair and full, pouty lips. She even sounded like Sharon when she spoke. To those who knew them both, the resemblance was almost eerie. Yet, Rochelle wasn’t Sharon. She had spent her whole young life wondering about a mother she didn’t really know and at the same time wishing she wouldn’t make the same mess out of her life. Distance had been a blessing. She and her younger sister, Denise, were raised by their father, preacher Mike Fuller, in Ohio.
When Rochelle's world had been rocked one last terrible time by her mother, the young woman would tell a confidant that as far as she was concerned, the woman who had given birth to her had never been a real mother to her.
“She made my life hell; every time I reached out to her and all the time knowing that she didn’t have anything to give. The whole time I’ve known her, it has been one big charade.”
And even though there was a deep bitterness between the two, a mix of abandonment, jealousy and distrust, there was also an undeniable connection. When Rochelle, at 15, pleaded with her mother to let her live in Colorado—away from her minister father and the tedium of the Midwest—Sharon agreed.
Sharon, however, could no more be a mother to Rochelle than she had been to Lorri Nelson. Sharon had to be her daughter's friend. She wanted to drink with, dance with, carouse around Trinidad with Rochelle.
Sharon was an equal—until, of course she needed to exert her considerable power to get her way.
And so they tried to be mother and daughter. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
The two enjoyed watching videos in front of the television with a bag of chips or bowl of butter-sopped popcorn. One movie in particular absorbed Sharon's attention: the Debra Winger/Theresa Russell thriller, Black Widow.
“She mates and kills,” had been the film's tagline.
“It was like she was so fascinated with the movie you wouldn’t believe it,” Rochelle told a friend later. “She was so drawn to it that I couldn’t talk to her or anything.”
Rochelle, like everyone else, tried to sort out her mother's boyfriends, lovers, whatever she called them. Gary Adams was so off and on, that Sharon's daughter didn’t know for certain where he fit in. Sharon would live with him, get dumped by him, rebound over and over. She would pick up a new guy. She would go back to another. Buzz Reynolds, the man who had been the source of the greatest hurt in Perry Nelson's messy marriage to Sharon, was one of those on the yo-yo string. Sharon told her family, her parents and sister, that she was going to walk down the aisle again. This time, she was going to marry Buzz Reynolds. Sharon's parents said they’d make the trip from Maryland to attend the wedding.
Maybe she was going to settle down, once and for all?
It was as if their daughter stayed up nights thinking of the most inappropriate acts, the most hurtful things that she could do. The checklist was long. The affairs had never been discussed, but Morris and Josephine Douglas were not completely blind. They knew more than Sharon ever gave them credit for. And before their visit to Round House on the eve of Sharon's supposed marriage to Buzz Reynolds, they might have thought the very fact that their daughter took up with another man while wed to a preacher would likely be the topper for most good girls gone bad. Not for their Sharon Lynn.
When the Douglases arrived for Sharon's wedding they were shocked to find their daughter shacked up with a man— and not even the groom. Gary Adams was sharing Sharon's bed as the ceremony with Buzz loomed. Even as she cut out the pattern for the wedding dress she was sewing, Gary was sprawled out waiting for her in the master bedroom.
It was too much. Once more, their middle daughter's behavior was over-the-line and unbelievably offensive.