Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(9)

Once set loose among shelves loaded with books, Beth had become a voracious reader, devouring everything in sight. She read biographies and autobiographies of world leaders, scientists, and philosophers. For math and science, she turned to things that were essentially college-level textbooks, most of which were well beyond Madeline’s limited capabilities to understand. But among the books Beth dragged home, the ones Madeline deemed to be approved reading material, Beth had managed to smuggle in some unapproved items as well—mysteries and romances, mostly. They were the kinds of stories where dashing young men arrived on the scene in the nick of time and carried vulnerable women off to live far better lives than they would have had otherwise.

But there was more to be found in libraries than just illicit books. Beth found computers there that had to be used in order to access materials. With Madeline nearby and sniffing her disapproval, Beth, under the guidance of a helpful library aide, laid hands on a computer keyboard for the very first time. Once that happened, Madeline’s previously unchallenged influence over her daughter’s life officially ended.

Beth soon discovered that library-based computers had far more to offer than just access to the computerized card catalog. With her face hidden behind a screen, she had cracked open the door to the outside world, including the miracle of Internet dating.

Eve, upon encountering that long-ago apple in the Garden of Eden, could not have been more thrilled than Beth was once she learned that by posting her profile on a Web site, she might end up meeting someone who was similarly minded, someone for whom she might be the perfect match. She had made a tentative start there, but it wasn’t until after she arrived at NAU that she connected with Ron.

It had happened right at the end of orientation week. Jenny had known all about setting up electronic devices, and her help had been invaluable in making Beth’s phone operational, creating accounts and passwords, and getting her logged on to the Internet.

And then, on Saturday night at the end of that week, with her roommate out for the evening, Beth had used Jenny’s laptop to post her profile on a different dating site from the one she’d tried before. Minutes later Ron had responded. Several others did, too, but those didn’t count and she didn’t bother replying. No, she saw finding Ron as a combination of beginner's luck and divine intervention.

Ronald Cameron was twenty-four and very good-looking. He was a recent college graduate, with an entry-level job working cybersecurity for the U.S. government. He lived in Washington, D.C. He loved to read. His parents were divorced. Like Beth, he had grown up with a domineering mother. He had just bought his first-ever new car. In other words, he checked every one of Beth Rankin’s boxes.

With all that in mind, Beth’s freshman-orientation week at NAU had been far more than a mere introduction to college life. It was also her introduction to the world at large, all of it made possible by the generosity and wisdom of her grandmother, Elizabeth Lockhart.

Granny Lockhart had never approved of the way Madeline raised Beth, insisting that homeschooling was destined to stunt Beth’s intellectual and social development, but it was only in death that the old woman had been able to deal out her ultimately winning hand. After Elizabeth’s passing, Madeline had been annoyed and Beth puzzled when Hugo Marsh, her grandparents’ longtime attorney, had insisted that seventeen-year-old Beth join her parents for the reading of her grandmother’s will.

By the time the process was over, a furious Madeline had been totally outmaneuvered. Elizabeth Lockhart had left her fully mortgage-free home in SaddleBrooke to her daughter and son-in-law, but she’d gone through all the legal and financial hoops necessary to create what was essentially a generation-skipping trust. Everything else went into that, enough to provide for her namesake’s undergraduate education and then some.

Both the will and the trust came with several ironclad stipulations. One said that anyone going against the will would automatically be precluded from benefiting from it. That specification alone had left Madeline in a state of seething fury.

But there were rules attached to Beth’s part of the bargain, too. In order to be eligible to benefit from the trust, Beth was required to attend Elizabeth Lockhart’s alma mater, Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, Arizona. While an undergraduate, she was required to maintain at least a 3.0 average. Upon graduation any funds remaining in the trust were to be released to Beth and to no one else for her to use however she saw fit. Any noncompliance meant that all remaining funds would automatically revert to a secondary beneficiary, Granny Lockhart’s preferred charity—a national women’s organization devoted to handing out scholarships. If Beth chose not to go on to college at all or if she attended some other school or dropped out prior to graduation, she was out of luck.

Madeline had fully expected for Beth to remain at home while attending school, preferably at a local community college. She most especially didn’t want her sheltered daughter going off to some faraway school where she would be exposed to all the wicked goings-on that seemed to be so much a part of college life these days. But according to Granny Lockhart’s wishes, it was NAU or nothing. Madeline’s parents had always been well-off, and she’d assumed that, as their daughter, she would be their primary heir. The idea that any of what she regarded as “her money” would end up in the hands of some kind of women’s scholarship fund drove Madeline nuts, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.