The Douglases could not stay another second in Round House. They gathered their things and left with barely a goodbye. They would not come to the wedding. They would not come to the reception. The future Mrs. Reynolds had, once more, gone too far.
Sister Judy remembered an indignant Sharon talking about it later.
“Sharon has always been mad that Mom and Dad made such a big deal out of it and left before the wedding. What did she expect?” she asked.
Judy went to the wedding, which actually amounted to little more than a big poolside party at the Reynolds’ sprawling ranch. A fairly decent band played and dozens, maybe a hundred, locals showed up. Judy considered Buzz a nice fellow and she hoped her sister would be happy.
When Judy left, however, she doubted things would work out between Sharon and Buzz. Sharon had been so vague about the legal aspect of the ceremony, Judy questioned if her sister was really married this time. Of course, just as she hadn’t really married Gary Adams in the mountain meadow, she hadn’t legally married Buzz.
Judy considered the whole thing another of her sister's strange charades.
“I doubt this wedding is real,” she confided to a friend. “I hope Sharon knows what she's doing.”
And while she was “married” to Buzz, Sharon, in fact, did have plans. She did have other things in mind. She still had her mountain man in her life.
How was it that Sharon could make the most outrageous requests seem as garden-variety, as benign, as asking someone to take out the garbage? Gary Adams stared at Sharon, focusing first on her eyes, then the gloss of her lips. Her lips had a life of their own; they drew him closer. Wet and luscious. Maybe whatever came from the lips was too powerful for him to dismiss.
He fought for reason to take control.
“Buzz needs to have an accident,” she said.
“Accident?” Gary asked, though he knew Sharon's idea of an accident meant causing the accident.
“Yes. I think he could have an accident real soon.”
Gary shook his head.
“Sharon, it's too soon.”
Why didn’t he say, “Sharon, you’re crazy?” Or, “Sharon, you are out of your fucking mind?”
“Too soon, baby,” he told her. “It's only been a couple of years since Perry.”
Sharon nuzzled her face in Gary's muscular chest and took a deep breath. She didn’t seem to care about how something might look. Coincidences happened all the time. One mother gave birth to three sets of twins. One man won the Lotto twice. Surely other women have lost two husbands. She didn’t want to give up. Water had worked before. It covered all mistakes. Gary himself had said so many, many times: Fire and water were the ways to cover a crime.
“It’d be real easy,” she cooed once more. “All you have to do is hit him on the head and have him fall in the lake.”
Gary wasn’t buying. It was a stupid and greedy idea.
“Think, Sharon. Here you are ‘married’ to two people…they’re dead and water is connected.”
Sharon backpedaled for a moment. She ditched the idea of the drowning. She suggested when Buzz was out making business deliveries might be a better time to get rid of him.
“He drives around out in the Canyon, you could drive by and shoot him and make it look like a robbery,” she said.
Gary changed the subject, telling his brazen beauty that no matter what was done, it was too soon.
“Besides, you two aren’t even legally married,” he concluded.
Bart Mason had never met a woman like Mrs. Nelson. What Bart didn’t know was that in the course of most lives very few people had. Bart was a good-looking guy whose interests were in perfect sync with his surroundings. He liked to hunt elk and deer. Several of the mounted deer heads that eternally gazed from the wall of his parents’ restaurant were his trophies. Bart was raised in a farm community a dozen miles from Trinidad; he graduated from Trinidad State Junior College with certificates in diesel mechanics and welding.
If his friends described him as a hell-raiser, that spoke more to his personality after a beer or two than his everyday demeanor.
When Harry Russell, a friend of the Mason family, asked Bart to come up to help put up sheetrock in the basement of Sharon Nelson's house in Wet Canyon, the young man agreed. Though Bart didn’t know it at the time, Harry had been involved on and off with the widow whenever Gary was out of the picture or when Buzz no longer satisfied her. In fact, it was Harry—not Gary Adams—that Oklahoma optometrist Bob Goodhead and his wife, Donna, observed in the driveway the day Perry was first deemed missing.
Years later, Bart would wish that he never laid eyes on mother or daughter.
Bart's first glimpse of Rochelle Fuller was one morning when he saw her still wearing her nightgown as she went outside to haul water. Bart offered to help and she didn’t even look up as she declined.