Sex. Murder. Mystery(83)

The transformation startled Dean.

“How come you’re not wearing your hair?” Dean asked.

Glen flashed a sheepish smile. “Well, Sher wanted to see me without it and she likes me better without it.”

Later, when they talked about his new love, Glen told Dean how happy he was. How nice her children were. How Sharon owned a beautiful place down in southeast Colorado, a mountain house near Trinidad.

“How could she afford that?” Dean wondered out loud.

Glen was quick with the answer.

“Insurance money after her husband died in a car wreck. She has the money now, but it was quite a wait for her to get it.”

The friendship had frayed like the hems of someone's weekend blue jeans. Rick had stood firm in his resolve to be a true friend, a friend who wouldn’t lie. He hated Sharon from the onset and blamed her for the dissolving relationship between the two friends. Whenever the group was getting together, Glen would make an excuse for Sharon's absence. In time, Glen stopped coming around, as well.

“I don’t trust her,” Rick said, his blue eyes boring a hole through his friend. “She's trying to keep you from your friends.”

Glen didn’t get it. He disagreed. He said he was stuck in the middle.

“I'm trying to keep the peace,” he said.

“But we’ve been friends longer than you and Sharon.”

None of that mattered to Glen, at least not enough to pull away from Sharon.

“She was always the controller, always wanting to control,” Rick said later. “I kept telling him she's no good, but he wouldn’t listen. He just wouldn’t stay away from her.”

Sharon Lynn Nelson was not the type of woman the now-newlywed Mikki Baker would have picked for Glen, either. She was not the type of woman he had picked in the past for himself when he expressed interest in a woman. Andy Harrelson was a natural beauty, with fine features and little need for makeup. While Mikki, who had battled a few extra pounds, thought Sharon was pretty and had a good body, she considered her sense of style to be somewhat tawdry.

Thank goodness she has a nice figure, because her pants are so form fitting.

“They were so tight you couldn’t believe it,” she told Rick Philippi. “She probably had to lay down to put them on. She had camel toes.”

When Sher wore shorts her attire left nothing to the imagination: it recalled the fashion of the 1960s.

“She doesn’t dress like a woman of her age… or like a mother,” Mikki said.

Rick concurred.

“The girls we know just don’t wear that type of stuff.”

As far as Glen's closest friends were concerned, Sher Nelson was a hot divorcee on the make and Glen was a lonesome guy looking for love. It was that loneliness and desperation for love and companionship that must have made him go with the woman from Weston.

Rick shook his head at the improbable.

Glen was not that type of person that would have a woman like her, he thought.

“I wonder what he sees in Sher?” he asked Mikki. “I can’t get him to see what I see. She has something that blinds him.”

Mikki didn’t have an answer. She didn’t really need one. Not long after it seemed that Glen and Sharon were inseparable, reports came through other Mends that the relationship was over.

The day Tara Harrelson learned Sharon had left her father and returned to Trinidad was both happy and sad. When she saw her father, her heart broke as he cried about the woman who had left him. Tara felt an awkward surge of happiness for herself. She had not felt that close to her father since Sharon had taken over his life.

“I thought we were back on the right track,” she told a friend later.

Reality had set in. Hooray for reality. Rick Philippi would have jumped for joy if he was sure Glen Harrelson wouldn’t sense it on the other end of the line. He could not have been happier with his friend's disclosure.

“Sher's out of my life,” he said.

“Why?” Rick asked, though the why didn’t really matter.

Ding dong the witch is dead!

“She's got another boyfriend.”

Glen's voice was wracked with grief, but Rick didn’t want to rub it in. Now wasn’t the time for that; there probably never was a time for that. Sher Nelson had done what she was bound to do. Rick hadn’t liked her since their lunch at Burger King.

“She's got another boyfriend and she's been dating you at the same time?”

“Yeah,” Glen said.

“How long has this been going on?”

“On and off for a few years.”

They talked for a while longer and made plans to get together in a day or so. When Rick hung up he had a smile on his face. His old friend was back. Glen was back.

It wasn’t that everyone was jealous of Sharon and her all-consuming relationship with the mild-mannered firefighter. It wasn’t that no one wanted Glen to be happy. Far from it. It was simply as clear as a Colorado summer sky to those closest to Glen that Sher was not the right woman for him.