Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(68)

“I’m done,” she said at last. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Where would you like to go?” Agent Norris asked. “We could put you in touch with your parents. . . .”

“No!” Beth said definitively. “Not my parents. I don’t want them involved in this. Just take me back to the dorm.”

They shut down the interview, and Agent Norris drove her home. It wasn’t until they stopped in front of Conover Hall that Beth realized she had neither her purse nor her keys. She had left completely empty-handed, and the dorm’s nighttime resident assistant wasn’t thrilled to be summoned from her bed to let Beth in at such an ungodly hour of the morning. Once Beth reached the room, she had no choice but to knock on the door and wake Jenny in order to be let in.

The door was flung open instantly, as though Jenny had been standing on the other side waiting. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, pulling Beth into a warm embrace. “They called and told me they’d found you but . . . Are you okay? What can I do to help?”

In reply Beth simply allowed herself to lean into Jenny’s protective arms, sobbing out the day’s worth of tension and hurt.

“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” Jenny murmured over and over, all the while patting Beth’s shoulder.

Standing there together in the open doorway of their shared room, for the first time in her life, Elizabeth Rankin understood what it meant to have a real friend.





Chapter 30





After their wine Joanna and Butch went to bed but not to sleep. Joanna was a cop. She knew too much about the often tragic aftermaths of cyberbullying. Too many of the vulnerable kids who’d been targeted in school ended up committing suicide, and the ones who didn’t die outright often suffered long-term effects, including debilitating cases of PTSD.

But Beth Rankin’s current situation came with the very real possibility of dire consequences for Jenny’s life as well. If there was a bad outcome for Beth, what were the chances of a similarly bad outcome for Jenny? Joanna recognized that her daughter was someone who cared about other people, sometimes too much. If Beth emerged from this ordeal with permanent emotional scars, would Jenny be similarly damaged? And because all those possible outcomes were completely beyond a mother’s control, Joanna found herself utterly terrified.

When the phone rang at 1:00 A.M., she’d been in bed for the better part of two hours, tossing and turning and unable to sleep. Butch evidently wasn’t asleep either, because as soon as she answered the phone, he turned on his bedside lamp and sat up. Jenny’s photo was in caller ID.

“Did they find her?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Jenny said. “They used a search-and-rescue bloodhound to track her down. She was hiding out in one of the heating and cooling plants right here on campus.”

“And she’s okay?”

“As far as I know. They told me they’ve taken her somewhere to be interviewed by the FBI and the campus cops. If they’d told me where she was, I’d be there right now.”

Joanna let out a sigh. Beth was safe, and if the FBI was on the scene, that meant Robin had come through in a big way.

“I’m sure you would be,” Joanna said. “But how are you doing?”

Jenny didn’t answer right away. “I looked at the rest of those photos,” she said finally.

The shock and revulsion in Jenny’s voice made Joanna’s heart hurt.

“They’re awful, Mom,” she continued. “Just seeing them made me sick to my stomach.”

What Joanna wanted to say was, Why on earth did you do that?—but she held her tongue.

“I didn’t mean to look,” Jenny continued, “but I couldn’t help it. I had glanced at them on Beth’s phone, but when they showed up in my e-mail, I ended up clicking on them anyway. I think Ron must have sent them to everyone in Beth’s contacts list.”

Joanna was horrified. “Including her parents?” she asked.

“Probably not, because her parents aren’t in her contacts list.”

That seemed strange. “They’re not?” Joanna asked.

“Why would they be? That’s part of Beth’s beef with them. They’re terminally opposed to all kinds of electronic communication.”

“In this case,” Joanna said, “that’s probably a blessing.”

Butch joined the conversation. “Jen,” he said, “would you like me to come up to Flag and serve as backstop? I’m sure Mom could hold down the fort here if you need me as moral support.”

Jenny seemed to pause for a moment, thinking, before she answered. “You probably shouldn’t come,” she replied at last. “The way things are right now, I’m not sure how comfortable Beth would be with having a strange man hanging around.”

“I’m strange, all right,” Butch said.

“Dad,” Jenny admonished. “You know what I meant—not strange as in odd but strange as in unknown. She’s really broken right now—broken and fragile.”

“Understood,” Butch agreed at once. “You’re the one who knows her, and you’re in a good position to assess her current situation, but if you change your mind and decide my being there would be helpful, let us know. In the meantime be sure to take care of yourself, starting with deleting all those photos from your computer and your phone. They’re bad for you, but they’re poison to Beth.”