by J. A. Jance
Beth had visited her grandmother there once, and she hadn’t minded it then—mostly, she supposed, because she hadn’t minded her grandmother. Granny Lockhart was one of the nicest people Beth had ever met. Too bad Granny’s niceness hadn’t been passed along to her daughter, Madeline. Granny had been easygoing and fun. Beth’s mother was neither.
Beth’s first visit to SaddleBrooke once her mother was in charge—the one over Thanksgiving weekend—had been a total disaster. At home Beth had lived under Madeline’s many strictly enforced guidelines, including a lights-out deadline of 10:00 p.m., no exceptions. The night before Thanksgiving, Madeline had noticed a light under the guest-room door at midnight. She had stormed inside and caught her daughter red-handed, talking on the phone with Ronald. Madeline had pitched a conniption fit, not only because of the lateness of the hour but also because of the presence of the phone.
For religious reasons, Madeline didn’t approve of devices of any kind. Typewriters were okay, up to a point, she supposed, but as for computers, cell phones, and iPads? No way! Those were not allowed in her house under any circumstances!
Naturally, that was the other piece of forbidden fruit, in addition to the sweatshirt, that Beth had purchased that first week of being away at school—her very first and very own cell phone. She’d wanted to purchase her own laptop as well, but with all the other expenses of starting school, her monthly stipend hadn’t been able to stretch that far. Fortunately, her new roommate, Jennifer, had allowed Beth to use her laptop until a month later, when Beth’s next stipend came in and she was able to purchase one of her own. For that first month or so, the phone was all Beth had needed.
When her mother had barged in on her that night, naturally Beth had ended Ron’s call. What followed had been a blazing shouting match between mother and daughter in which Madeline had demanded Beth hand over the phone, something Beth refused to do. It was her private property, and she was keeping it. The exchange became so heated that eventually Beth’s dad, Kenneth, had bestirred himself long enough to insert himself into the fray, not that he’d had a word to say in Beth’s defense. He never did. In any disagreement between mother and daughter, Beth’s dad always took Madeline’s side. Only now was Beth beginning to realize that maybe it was easier for him to do that and take the path of least resistance. There was little doubt that if he’d come down in Beth’s favor, Madeline would have made his life a living hell.
In any event, the fight between Beth and her mother, staged in the early-morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, had been epic. Finally, with her mother still standing there screeching at her, calling her daughter an ungrateful wretch among other choice names, Beth had calmly climbed out of bed, gotten dressed, packed her things, and left the house in the middle of the night, curfew be damned!
It was a three-mile hike from her folks’ place out to the highway—a difficult three-mile hike at that, especially since Beth was dragging a Rollaboard behind her and wearing a heavily loaded backpack. It had been cold, too, but not that cold. After all, she was accustomed to winters in Nebraska, and those were cold down to the bone.
Since Beth was without a vehicle, her father had driven up to Flagstaff to bring her to SaddleBrooke. Now she had to get back on her own. During the trip down, she hadn’t paid that much attention to the landscape around her or to the roads they were traveling. Once she finally reached SaddleBrooke’s main entrance, she was dismayed to see that the highway outside the development was virtually deserted at this time of night. Beth had thought maybe she’d be able to flag down a bus and purchase a ticket, but she soon discovered that no buses were available, leaving her with only one option—hitchhiking.
She knew that sticking out her thumb in the middle of the night was a dangerous proposition, especially for girls her size—a petite five foot three. But she had already figured out that there were lots of dangerous places these days, including college campuses. With that in mind, she’d started carrying a switchblade in her pocket and a can of wasp spray in her purse, just in case she needed them.
A seemingly unnecessary stoplight at SaddleBrooke’s brightly illuminated entrance blinked endlessly through its cycle of green, orange, and red, while Beth stood there for what felt like forever. Twice, approaching vehicles raised her hopes by slowing, but each time they ended up turning into SaddleBrooke rather than stopping. At last a pickup truck came speeding through the green light, only to slow to a crawl on the far side of the intersection. To Beth’s surprise, the backup lights came on as the driver put the vehicle in reverse. When the truck finally stopped in front of her, the driver buzzed down the passenger window. “Need a ride?” he asked.
Feeling wary, Beth loaded her luggage into the bed of the truck and then climbed into the passenger seat. Fortunately, her Good Samaritan, as nice as could be, turned out to be a guard at the prison in Florence. He was on his way to fill in for someone else who’d gone home sick. Once at the prison, he parked Beth in a lobby and found a buddy of his who was willing to give her a ride to Apache Junction once his shift ended at 6:00 a.m.
From Apache Junction on, there’d been lots more traffic, and none of the people who’d offered her rides had been the least bit out of line either. Her experiences along the road led Beth to conclude that maybe hitchhiking wasn’t nearly as dangerous as everyone, and most especially her mother, claimed it was. Even so, it was still late afternoon on Thanksgiving Day before Beth finally made it back to Conover Hall on the NAU campus. For dinner she’d made do with cheese, crackers, and a soda from a 7-Eleven just off campus. Beth hadn’t spoken to either one of her parents since then, and she had no intention of doing so. She was done with them, and, she supposed, they were done with her as well.
Yawning, Beth checked the time—ten past twelve. Ron’s late-night phone calls—make that his midnight phone calls—were a challenge. Initially they had e-mailed back and forth using Jenny’s computer until Beth purchased her own. Now, however, even though Beth had a laptop of her own, they communicated almost entirely by one-way video chats. Due to Ron’s job requirements, midnight was the only time of day when he could speak to her, and even then he had to initiate the calls. Ron had Beth’s number; his number was always blocked and his image blurred for security reasons. Beth didn’t regard that as an entirely satisfactory arrangement, but she went along with it. And once he finally did get around to calling, they usually talked for an hour or more.
Going to bed late and getting up early left Beth perpetually sleep-deprived. No wonder she fell asleep in her classes. No wonder she couldn’t hold her head up when it came time to do homework. It was lucky Beth was smart enough to get by anyway. Independent study through library excursions intended to augment her mother’s bare-bones homeschooling meant that Beth was already familiar with a good deal of the material being presented in her freshman-level classes. She suspected she’d be able to pass most of her courses without cracking a book, but she needed to maintain the 3.0 GPA that Granny Lockhart’s trust required.
With a sigh Beth looked at her phone once more. Ron was later than usual, and she needed to get to bed soon. She had an early class on Thursday mornings, but she didn’t want to go to bed without talking to him. This was the best part of her day. She needed to hear his voice, needed to listen to the sweet things he said to and about her. His loving words each night were all that made her life worthwhile.
But now, sitting there alone, Beth thought about her parents. She had long rebelled against the teachings of the beloved pastor at her parents’ church. After Madeline and Kenneth Rankin married, they had fallen in with a small but strict religious sect. Pastor Ike, the sect’s original founder, was the one who had decreed that electronic devices were the source of all evil, a belief Madeline Rankin had accepted with a willing heart.
Pastor Ike also insisted that children educated at public schools were doomed to become pawns of the devil, which led to Madeline’s decision to homeschool her daughter. Granny Lockhart, a librarian and a lifelong reader, had sen
t her own daughter to public schools. Naturally, Madeline’s path to rebellion had led her in the opposite direction, becoming an indifferent student who hated reading and despised books, choices that made her embrace Pastor Ike’s teachings without any reservation.
Madeline’s contempt for learning should have precluded her from homeschooling her daughter, especially a child who happened to be exceptionally bright. By the time Beth was twelve, she had easily outstripped her mother’s limited grasp of both math and science. When it became apparent to all concerned, even Madeline, that Beth wouldn’t be able to progress further without outside help, rather than enrolling her in the local public school system Madeline had sought help from their neighborhood library. Madeline might not have liked books, but she was willing to tolerate her daughter’s love for reading, and that one chink in her Pastor Ike armor was all it had taken to set Beth on a brand-new path.
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.
Left with no alternative and unwilling to pay for Beth’s schooling on her own, Madeline had grudgingly taken possession of the house in SaddleBrooke, allowed her daughter to enroll as a freshman at NAU, and kept her mouth shut—right up until Thanksgiving weekend, when Beth had gone so far off the rails as to bring one of those forbidden, filth-filled cell-phone things into Madeline’s home. For Madeline that was the last straw, and for Beth it was the next rung on her ladder to independence.
The phone buzzed in Beth’s hand. Ron at last. “Hey, babe,” he said, “how’s my sweet Betsy from Pike?”
Beth didn’t like it when he called her that. The term came from a corny old folk song about Betsy crossing the prairie with her husband, Ike. The reason Beth hated the song so much was the Ike part. The name reminded her too much of home and church and Pastor Ike—of everything Beth Rankin was trying to escape. She wanted to tell Ron that she would rather be called Beth or even Elizabeth, but she wasn’t brave enough. She let the words pass without making an objection.
“Oh, Ron,” she breathed. Just the sound of his voice sent her heart fluttering wildly in her chest. “I’m so glad you called. I was afraid we wouldn’t have a chance to talk tonight. I love you so much, and I didn’t want to miss it.”
Chapter 3
With Butch off on tour, the early-morning scramble was the bane of Joanna’s existence. Getting everyone up, dressed, fed, and ready for school and work was complicated to say the least, and doing so in a timely manner was almost impossible. That Thursday morning Denny might have missed his bus and Joanna most certainly would have been late to work if Carol hadn’t shown up around seven thirty to finish pulling all the critical pieces together.
On Joanna’s drive between home and office, she took a piece of Butch’s advice to heart and placed a call to the main number at Rob Roy Links. Myron Thomas usually stayed on each night to oversee the closing of the restaurant and bar, so she didn’t expect him to answer, but she left a message asking if his party room would be available for a retirement gathering sometime during December. By the time she pulled in to her parking place at the Justice Center, she had switched gears from mommy duty to cop duty and was ready to go back to work on that budget request.
She was deep into that when Chief Deputy Tom Hadlock stormed into her office a little before ten. “We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“An OIS.”
OIS was copspeak for officer-involved shooting, and having one of those in her department was unwelcome news indeed. Joanna was on her feet and reaching for her Kevlar vest, hanging on a nearby coatrack, before Tom finished speaking.
“Who?” she demanded, as she slipped on the vest. “Anybody hurt?”
She didn’t usually wear one when she was in her office, but she always did when she was out on calls, and she insisted that her people do the same. Hopefully that would be the case here.
“Deputy Ruiz,” Tom answered. “And it sounds like he’s hurt real bad.”
A sudden chill seemed to fill the room. Not another deputy! Joanna thought despairingly. “Where did this happen?” she demanded.
“Armando went out to Whetstone first thing this morning to deliver a no-contact order. He was at an address on Sheila Street right at the edge of town when it all went south. He sent out a shots-fired/officer-down call, requesting backup and medical assistance. Officers and EMTs from Huachuca City are on their way.”