Free Sex. Murder. Mystery. by Gregg Olsen Page B

had to be moistened so she could peel it away from her skin. Judy Douglas vowed she’d save every penny she could get her hands on and she’d get the hell out of there.
    She was sixteen when she left home.
    “If I had stayed, maybe I would have got the education I deserved. Maybe I would not have married an abusive man. But leaving was my sanity. It was the right thing to do. It was not rebellion. It was survival. Sharon and I learned different ways to survive.”
    Even though she would never say the two of them had forged a close father-daughter relationship, Sharon was her daddy’s shadow. She followed him around whenever she could. Mostly she tagged along on errands and when he worked around the house. Morris Douglas was a capable carpenter who put a great deal of emphasis on getting the job done right. He didn’t have a whole lot of interests outside of his work and, of course, the church. And while he was not as humorless as Josephine, Morris was not exactly a barrel of fun. Sharon was close to her father, she would later insist, only by default. Her mother was simply too distant.
    Among the lessons of good living, Morris Douglas showed his middle daughter that the rules could be bent just a little. Whenever they’d go into town to the hardware or feed store, he’d buy little Sharon a Coke, which contained caffeine, something forbidden by the church.
    “Better throw the bottle out before we get home, so your mother doesn’t find out,” he told her after many such trips.
    And if Morris did bend the rules, it was never to the complete breaking point.
    One time, when they were school-age, Judy and Sharon found a stack of girlie magazines stashed in their father’s toolbox up in the attic. The discovery knocked the wind out of them. Not their daddy. Someone else’s father—the whiskey-breathed men outside of their faith looked at that sort of material. Not him. How could it be? It seemed as though their father lived in two worlds: the church and the real world.
    And though it was as wrong as wrong could be, the girls could not stay away from the magazines.
    “We’d sneak up there and look at them. Our daddy didn’t do things like that.”
    When Sharon was in grade-school, she learned for the first time that despite what they preached, many other adults broke the rules to devastating and far-reaching consequence. She was a beautiful little girl then, with gorgeous eyes and thick, curly hair. She was also a target.
    Two incidents took place before she was ten.
    Sharon had no reason to feel anything but safe sitting in the backseat of the car while a group of Seventh-Day Adventists went out to raise money for the support of the church. As they went from house to house, eight-year-old Sharon sat sandwiched between two men. One of the men put his hand on her lap.
    “I’m tired,” the church member said. “And my hands are very cold.”
    Sharon felt his fingers slide up under her skirt and pull at her panties. She pulled her legs tighter together. She yanked at his arm, but said nothing. She didn’t want the other man to know what was going on.
    A couple of years later, it happened again. This time, the abuser Was an elderly employee at the academy. Sharon had heard stories from other girls that the man’s hands wandered, but she thought she was safe. She was good friends with the family. She was wrong. One afternoon when she went to get some cleaning supplies from the storage closet, the old man pushed her inside and grabbed her crotch and fondled her.
    Years later when Sharon recalled how she told her mother about the fondling by the janitor, she said the old woman insisted she had never heard of the incident. One thing Josephine was certain about, however, was if her middle daughter had been a little older at the time of the alleged abuse, she’d have been less compliant.
    “You’d have given him what for, because you were so much like your daddy,” Josephine said.
    Sharon shook her head and