Sex. Murder. Mystery(13)

Adventists still believe the second coming is imminent. Death is only a sleeping state until He comes. And, of course, they follow a seventh-day Sabbath. Worship services are held in pleasant—though somewhat austere—churches on Saturdays. Being an Adventist is more than following a religion. It is a culture, a way of life.

On July 3, 1945, Sharon Lynn Douglas was born into such an existence.

When the memories of her childhood came so many years later, she pressed her slender fingers, nails lacquered like red Chinese boxes, to her lips. It was as if by doing so she could stifle the very recollection of what resonated through her mind. The instant it came flooding back, she knew such retrospection had been throttled for decades for good reason. To avoid thinking about what had happened to her was to save herself from being a slave to the past. Sharon Lynn buried her face into her hands, soft curls of bleached blond hair falling past her wrists. She wanted no part of the past, and in fact had spent the last third of her adult life trying to escape it. She was MGM’s Dorothy in Oz and her first twenty-five years had been nothing but grainy images in black and white. Color only came when there was freedom.

Her tear ducts rained when she deliberated on growing up inside the impervious shell of fraudulent perfection.

“I had to be the compliant little person, but I got tired of it. So I’d have my little sneaky ways to find someone who would make me feel I was pretty, and I was important. I think I could have been a real good minister’s wife/call girl.”

When her awakening came as a young woman, it was the result of a desire to cast off the restrictions of the past, to possess everything she saw. Sharon had missed so much. She had been deprived. She would no longer wait.

The red lipstick, the blue of a lover’s eyes, the excitement of feeling… was everything her heart desired.

Sharon Lynn was the middle daughter born to Morris and Josephine Douglas, a hardworking carpenter, and his wife, a homemaker and part-time church bus driver. Though the family was Seventh-Day Adventist, they might as well have been old order Amish, so restrictive was their particular interpretation of their religion. No dancing. No movies. No bowling. Family legend has it that when Elvis Presley swiveled his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show, Mr. Douglas went haywire and put an end of television viewing in the tidy household in rural Reisterstown, Maryland.

Morris Douglas was a sandy-haired man with the outward appearance and speaking cadence of a country boy all grown up. He was the type of man who’d stuff his hands deep into the folds of his dungaree pockets, clear the phlegm from his throat and speak his piece. Though it might take him an hour to make his point, when he did, there was no doubt about his meaning. His main message was always: My daughters will be good girls.

Before the Elvis debacle, Josephine Douglas would stand in front of the television set and spread her skirts to conceal the television whenever a cigarette commercial came on the air. Before they had their short-lived TV, the lady of the house would take a tube from the radio when she left to go shopping or run errands in town. She was firm in her resolve: No one would be corrupted by the wrong music when she was not around to turn the radio off.

In her middle daughter’s eyes, there was no woman more lovely than Josephine Douglas. Her almost-black hair and dark brown eyes shimmered from across the room. But if she was lovely to look at, Sharon considered her mother somewhat cold and undeniably aloof. If only there had been a pretty smile to go with the rest of her lovely face. When she was younger, Sharon thought her mother was quiet because she had put herself above others, was stuck-up. Later, she realized it was because Josephine was a woman who simply didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She didn’t want to stand out from the other women of the church. Josephine never in her life wore makeup or jewelry.

Josephine was as serious as she was beautiful. Sharon would grow into adulthood without a single memory of her mother laughing. She never let her hair down. If the woman never had a good time, as Sharon would frequently insist, it was because her singular focus was on her religion.

God’s hand was felt on everything the Douglas family did.

When Josephine was upset she would go to the bedroom, shut the door, cry and pray. She would grapple with the pages of a Bible so used that pages literally fluttered to the floor.

Sharon always knew why her mother kept the old one.

Don’t get a new Bible! It’d be like saying the old one wasn’t any good.

Judy Douglas, on the other hand, never thought their mother was gorgeous. The oldest of the three girls never allowed herself to think those kind of thoughts—not when she viewed her parents as her persecutors. As her enemy.