Her father's betrayal? What betrayal? Sharon had slept with a half dozen guys and murdered Perry. Betrayal? Lorri had heard enough. She realized at that moment that she had come to say something, not to listen to the woman behind the glass. The woman behind the glass could say nothing that would undo what she and her lover had done.
“I want you to know that you not only killed my father,” Lorri began, her voice breaking into a million pieces, “you also killed my children's grandfather and my grandparents’ son. You killed your own children's father… and they say you paid a man fifty thousand dollars to do it.”
Sharon looked down as a preschooler does when caught misbehaving.
“I would gladly have paid you ten times the amount you paid Gary, if you would have spared Dad. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?”
“No, Lorri, it doesn’t,” Sharon answered, now irritated by her visitor.
Lorri stood up. “I hate you. And I will hate you forever.”
“I know,” Sharon said.
With that, Lorri turned to leave. How she found her way out of there, she would never quite know. A man offered help as she sobbed her way down the hallway, but she declined. Outside, she realized she had not returned the plastic-laminated visitor's tag that had been affixed to her blouse when she was processed for the visit.
She could think of nothing but her father and the lies her stepmother had told her.
On the way back to the Springs, the snow came down like talc. Lorri could barely see as she drove along the freeway, remembering Sharon and her father. Remembering the en-counter she had had with evil. Between the tears and the falling snow, Lorri would later wonder if only the hand of God had assured her safety.
After her sister was picked up by Tygart and Trainor and taken away to jail, Judy Douglas tried to figure out what had gone wrong and how it could have been stopped. When could it have been stopped? She knew whatever role Sharon had in the deaths of her second and third husbands, it was the result of a seed planted long ago. Sharon had been on a selfish course to disaster since she was a child. Sharon was a speeding train that could not be stopped. And though she had not allowed herself to believe that Sharon was capable of murder, Judy became consumed with guilt and worry that if only she had told Glen that things were not so great between him and his wife, that Sharon was a woman who could never settle for just one man at a time, things would have turned out differently. Maybe he would have been alive if Judy had told him to leave Sharon.
Judy also wondered if well-to-do Buzz Reynolds hadn’t been an intended murder victim a couple of years before.
“Maybe it just didn’t work out for Gary and Sharon at that time,” she said later. “I'm still not sure that Buzz and she were legally married, but I suppose that wouldn’t stop Sharon.”
But there had been money involved, though Sharon insisted that Gary took their love to the extreme and killed Glen so the two of them could be together. Killing Glen, she said, was never about money.
But it had not been for love, after all. As Andy Harrelson figured it, Glen's murder would have resulted in a bloody windfall for Sharon and Gary. She would have picked up half of the house, with equity of more than $100,000; life insurance of $30,000; balloon payments due from the businesses Glen had sold that would have been tens of thousands in proceeds; his house on Columbine Court; and his pension—which would have paid her $1,200 a month for the rest of her life.
Not to mention any life insurance policies that she might have taken out herself. Unless the brass-balled widow made a death benefit claim, such policies would likely never surface.
Grandma Nelson's neck had never healed properly after a nasty fall. It left the elderly woman with a stooped appearance, causing her to tilt her head upward to see straight ahead. Doctors told family members Perry's mother should have recovered more fully from the fall, but for the stress and devastation of losing her son. A broken heart, the doctor explained, can affect the body's ability to heal.
Yet every morning, as she had done for her whole life, the nearly eighty-year-old woman would wake before dawn to kneel by her bedside and pray. Her hands were weathered and the veins rose to the surface as they often do in older people. After her son disappeared, Mrs. Nelson prayed he would be found safe and sound. After his body was discovered in Clear Creek, she prayed her boy had not suffered long.
It was after Sharon confessed to murder that Mrs. Nelson pressed her shaking hands together and prayed for answers.
“Why, Lord, why did You take our son away? Why did You let this happen?”
One time, as clear as a whisper in her ear, Mrs. Nelson received an answer. It came to her as if spoken by the Almighty.