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 disagreed.
“It wouldn’t have mattered what age I was. I don’t think I’d have said anything.”
Chapter 5
NEITHER OF THE THORNTON POLICE DETECTIVES said they were tired or that they wanted to go to the motel back in Trinidad. But it was getting late. It was also obvious that while Sharon Nelson Harrelson professed no knowledge of who might have harmed her third husband, Glen, it was clear she was not being entirely forthcoming. She talked around certain subjects, refusing to address much with any real deal of directness. The emotions stirred by what had happened had clouded her thinking, she said. Although she made sobbing noises into a crinkly tissue, an action that seemed more fake than a half-price antique, and dabbed at her eyes, no tears were evident.
“Where were you when your husband was killed?” Thornton detective Glen Trainor asked with steady, unblinking blue eyes.
“I was here at home,” Sharon hastily replied.
Her speed to answer and her response was startling. Both Glen Trainor and partner Elaine Tygart knew that by all rights the woman with the crumbled Kleenex had no way of knowing when the murder had occurred. How was it that she was so certain she had been at home? Even the investigators still didn’t know exactly when the fireman died.
Trainor’ s heart jumped in his chest. He exchanged a quick glance with his partner. This was clearly more than a death notification. This was bigger.
“Out of everybody that you know,” the young detective asked, “who would be more likely to kill your husband?”
Sharon shook her head. “I can’t think of anyone.”
Again, her words triggered suspicion. The investigators knew from on-the-job experience an innocent person often can conjure a short list of enemies when it comes to the murder of a loved one. It can be an ex-spouse, a neighbor whose dog barked, a person involved in a failed business venture. There is always someone.