“I'm leaving here,” he said.
Bart could care less. If anything, he was glad the guy was getting out of town.
“It don’t matter to me,” the young man fired back.
Instead of getting angrier and stomping all over the place, Harry Russell dropped the bomb.
“Last night in bed,” Harry said, “Sharon said that she had Perry killed for fifty thousand dollars and if I didn’t move out she’d have me killed, too.”
Bart didn’t think so. Harry Russell was such a liar.
“Yeah, you big piece of shit,” Bart said.
Not long after the scene at the restaurant, Harry departed from the Trinidad area. Scuttlebutt had it that Sharon gave him $5,000 and a pickup to disappear from Wet Canyon.
As far as Sharon was concerned, everything, it seemed, had its price.
Try as she might, Judy Douglas was unable to feel a fondness for Sharon's mountain man boyfriend. There was something about the man that kept a bizarre foothold in her sister's life. She figured some might romanticize it as macho and tough. She saw it as controlling and mean-spirited. Sharon had a hard edge to her at times, too. The two of them were all wrong for each other.
She watched from a window as Sharon and Gary exchanged heated words in her Colorado Springs backyard one afternoon after Sharon ditched Harry and Buzz and went back to her true love from the ramshackle house at the bottom of Cougar Ridge.
They’ll never make it, those two, she thought as she turned away. Never in a million years, not unless they give up the power game they keep playing with each other.
Sharon was no quitter when it came to games. But in the end, Judy figured, the two would simply tire of each other and call it quits. It was all she could hope for. And with Sharon's practice of moving from man to man, it seemed like a good bet.
Few could understand Lorri's obsession with her former stepmother. It was motivated by hate, not devotion. Sharon was always on her mind. In her dreams. Lorri could never forgive the former preacher's wife for all that she had done to her family. As far as Lorri could see, her parents might still be together if Sharon had stayed in Durham where she belonged. Though Lorri didn’t know it at the time, she needed closure. She needed confrontation with her stepmother. Though her faith told her to forgive, her heart was still broken over the time she had lost with her father. At the very least, she blamed Sharon.
On a visit from Montana to Rocky Ford, Lorri convinced childhood friend Kerry Wheeler that the two of them ought to drive out to Buzz Reynolds’ place to confront Sharon. When the two young women arrived, they immediately spotted Sharon's Mustang in the driveway. A dejected Buzz stood outside, apparently having heard them drive up.
“Sher's not here,” he said, when Lorri made inquiry.
“Then how come her car's here?”
“She's not here. Moving up to Denver. She's sending Rochelle back for her car later.”
Lorri didn’t believe him. She looked over Buzz's shoulder toward the house, straining to see a shadowy figure lurking behind the curtains.
And though Lorri would have liked to have it out with Buzz, too, she softened a bit. Though he wasn’t about to cry, the man with the dark, weathered complexion of a rancher was clearly upset. His heart had been busted.
“I love Sharon,” he said, sadly. “I wanted to be with her and raise those kids as my own. I would have done anything for her.”
They talked for a few minutes, about Sharon, about Misty and Danny, and the young women left.
“Maybe she's here, but she just doesn’t want to see you?” Kerry suggested.
Lorri shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess with Sharon, I’ll never know.”
Kerry Wheeler grinned. Trying to catch up with Sharon Nelson was a bit like acting out in a television show.
“Did you see the curtain move?” she asked.
Both laughed as Buzz's ranch disappeared from view.
Gary and Sharon had been talking about their impending marriage for months, probably for as long as they had been together. Throughout the ups and downs, the Harrys, the Buzzs, the others, they had always come back to each other. No one who knew them could make any sense of it. For all Bart Mason knew, it was a marriage made in lust. Gary and Sharon were moving to Denver to get away from all the bullshit of the Canyon. To escape the stares and the whispers. To start over.
Bart and Rochelle were planning on staying in Round House while Sharon and Gary rented a house outside of Denver.
One day while Bart worked outside in the frosty chill of a December day, Sharon and Rochelle approached him.
“Rochelle wants a commitment,” Sharon said.
Rochelle stood there, saying nothing.
Bart was caught off guard. “Yeah?”
“Well,” Sharon said, “will you marry Rochelle?”