“He didn’t make it, Andy,” Jim said. “I'm so sorry.”
“I'm going to the house,” she said.
“No. You stay there. I'm coming over.”
Todd Harrelson overheard his mother's end of the conversation and joined her at the kitchen table. As they held each other, the teen and his mother cried before going upstairs to tell Tara. The sixteen-year-old girl fell apart. She and her father had been close, despite Sharon's frequent meddling. Tara loved her dad. She was, in her eyes and his, Daddy's Girl.
Andy Harrelson still loved Glen. She loved the good parts of their marriage and the children they had made together. By the time she had her wits about her, her home was filled with people from the fire department, the police, even a witness assistance professional from the county.
Shock was displaced by sorrow and worry. She asked if Sharon had been notified. An officer said they had not yet made that call. In fact, they couldn’t call. Sharon Harrelson had no phone in her remote house in southeastern Colorado.
“This is going to be so hard on Sharon,” Andy told the victims assistance woman. “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”
The victims assistance person excused herself to make a call.
Todd and Andy went upstairs, away from the activity that was enveloping their home. A mob of uniforms had taken over. Tara had gone to be with a girlfriend. Andy caught her son's anguished face in the dressing-room mirror.
Clarity had begun to set in as the initial shock turned from upheaval to numbness.
Andy's own words echoed in her consciousness: “She just lost another husband not too long ago.”
“Sharon did it,” she said.
Todd looked hard at his mother, prompting her to say more.
“Oh my God,” she said quickly, as if she could censor what she had blurted out. “I'm sorry I said that.”
But she wasn’t sorry, not really. From what she had seen, Sharon was the type of woman who’d be behind something like her husband's murder.
Anxiously, Mikki Baker took another look at the clock. What was keeping Glen? He was supposed to get in touch with her before they met for coffee that Saturday morning at Village Inn off 84th Ave and 1-25. She reran what he had said, and she became worried.
“I have something to talk to you about. I can’t tell you, now. I just need to see you.”
Mikki told her husband, Steve, about her concerns. It wasn’t like Glen to not call when he said he would. She got dressed and planned on going to the coffee shop to see if Glen had forgotten and showed up.
Instead, from her bedroom telephone, she dialed his number on the off chance that he had returned to Columbine Court.
A man identifying himself as a police officer answered her call.
For a minute, Mikki thought she had misdialed. But she knew Glen's number by heart. She hung up.
“Call the number again,” Steve told her.
The same man answered. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Mikki Baker. I'm trying to reach Glen Harrelson and his number is ringing you.”
“Why are you calling?”
“He's a friend of mine. We’re getting together for coffee this morning.”
Steve watched his wife's face grow white. Later, when Mikki Baker recounted what the man said, she would not be able to come up with the exact words. Something about an accident. Something about a dead man. The line had been patched over from the bumed-out house to the Thornton police station.
“Glen's dead,” she said, tears already flowing.
Steve Baker reached out for his wife and held her.
“What's Sharon going to do?” Mikki sobbed. “This is the second husband she's lost to death.”
Steve shook his head.
“Mikki,” he finally said, “don’t be too hasty. I told you there's something about her. I don’t like her.”
Mikki stopped listening to her husband for a moment. Her thoughts slipped to Glen and the reason they were going to have coffee that morning.
“He never got to tell me what he so desperately wanted to say,” she said.
* * *
A hot shower was all he wanted. Rick Philippi returned from pheasant hunting in Kit Carson, on the Kansas state line and was on his way to the shower when his wife, Theresa, stopped him with the grim news.
“Glen's dead. He's been killed in his house! His body, Rick, was set on fire.”
Rick was shocked into silence as grief took hold. How could that have happened?
Something wasn’t right, he thought.
Finally it hit him. “Where's his wife?” he asked.
Theresa Philippi knew what her husband was thinking.
“They’re looking for her,” she said.
“She did it. I know she did it. I just know it.”
When Sharon's son-in-law, Bart Mason, picked up the phone in his rambling old Trinidad house, it was Glen Harrelson's mother, Ruby, calling all the way from Des Moines, Iowa. The kindly old woman had some bad news and needed to reach Sharon right away.