Free Sex. Murder. Mystery. by Gregg Olsen

time her mother was pregnant with Joy, the youngest of the three sisters.
    “She was just waiting for the train coming along,” Sharon recalled of the story. “She didn’t want to be there anymore. I’ve never talked to my mom about it.”
    And despite her own despair, appearances remained everything in the household over which Josephine Douglas presided. It was supposed to be a close family with no worries, no sadness. Oddly, though Sharon idolized her older sister, she was forbidden to play with her.
    “Mom didn’t want any fights. She didn’t want noise,” Judy recalled. “Mom kept us apart. The fact Sharon has no feelings or emotions or can’t show them might be based in part on the fact that she was so isolated by our mother.”
    Bitterness flowed with their mother’s milk; it seeped into the air they breathed. In the Douglas household, emotions were expertly hidden. It wasn’t that emotions weren’t felt. They were not talked about; they weren’t expressed. The girls were taught that they loved everybody—not that they should love everybody. Hate was a four-letter word as ugly as the unseemly ones spoken by those outside their faith. Like most people, members of the Douglas family had a public face, yet for the most part they wore the same mask at home. They were emotional chameleons.
    Judy and Sharon became just like their parents. They became adept at keeping secrets.
    What others thought of a person was far more important than the truth of someone’s actions or character. Lies became part and parcel of creating the most perfect of facades.
    “Sharon was taught to be who she is,” sister Judy said after her younger sister’s world crashed around her, “and she learned her lesson very well. Sharon’s deviousness was probably a way to protect herself.”
    Everything, all the time, was in the name of God. No accomplishments were the result of the person’s actions or choices, but a reflection of what the Lord had done. At seven years old, when Judy took the bus from the Maryland countryside to the Seventh-Day Adventist academy in Baltimore, she was proud that she hadn’t cried and that she had made her first such trip all by herself.
    At the dinner table, her father praised Judy for being so grown-up while her mother looked on and said nothing. It was little Sharon, still in a high chair, who spoke up.
    “Oh, Judy didn’t go to school by herself,” she said. “Jesus went with her.”
    Everything Sharon and her sisters did that was perceived by their parents as good, God had His hand in it. Everything the girls did that was bad was something they had chosen to do.
    They were two little girls in white nightgowns. Judy was almost six and her sister Sharon three when her stomach started to give her pains. Acrid vomit surged from her mouth, diarrhea stained her bedclothes. Judy was in a panic to get herself cleaned up before their mother found out. She didn’t like any stink, any disarray. Little Sharon scurried about the room helping her flu-stricken sister clean up.
    Judy would always hang on to the image of her little sister working like a crazed beaver cleaning up the wretched results of her sick stomach and bowels. She’d never forget how the little girl told her it would be all right. Their mother would never know and Judy would be safe. She wouldn’t get in trouble.
    Mrs. Douglas didn’t like any messes.
    “Lysol commercials remind me of my mother,” Judy later said. “We talked on the phone and she put Lysol on it.”
    And so it went. Year after year. Hour after hour.
    God had a place at the immaculate dinner table set by Josephine Douglas. God had a place in the bathroom. The bedroom. There was nothing Josephine did that didn’t include her devotion to God. She took care of her children with the idea that it was her sole job into raising them in a manner that prepared them to live in His Kingdom. It was her job to see they grew up with good values, respect for others and love for