CHAPTER SIX
Ben had not expected to hear from Lizzie so soon. He assumed she would be dealing with her dad’s heart attack for at least a day or two. Going without a phone must be driving her crazy. He used the code she’d given him to log in and opened the call log. Sure enough, there was an incoming call at two twenty-seven from someone listed as “Bella” in her contacts.
He used his own phone to call the number. Lizzie had warned him she was only seventeen, but he was still taken aback by how young she sounded when she answered.
“Bella Parker?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Who’s this?” the girl said in that half-bored, half-snotty tone teenagers used. He knew it well. The sounds of kids yelling and lockers slamming threatened to drown her out. He glanced at the clock and realized school had just let out.
“My name is Ben. I’m a fire investigator for the New Bern FR. Do you have a minute for a couple of questions?”
That squelched the teenage attitude, and she answered in a more serious tone. “Yes, sure. School’s over, I have a few minutes before practice starts. Hold on. I can barely hear you.”
A second later, the background noise disappeared.
“Okay. I dipped into the library. It’s way more quiet.”
“Great. I’ll try to make this brief. Can you tell me what happened last Saturday night?”
“Well, I went to a party with a friend. A different friend was gonna give us a ride to her house, where we were supposed to spend the night, but she bailed, leaving me and my friend kinda stuck. We’d…um…we had…uh…we couldn’t drive.”
“You’d been drinking?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “I called Lizzie to ask if she’d come get us. It was after two o’clock. Maybe closer to two-thirty. She came right away and took us back to her place. We spent the night there.”
“Did you see or hear her leave the condo after she picked you up?”
“I didn’t feel so good and couldn’t fall asleep for a while. I heard the shower run, and then, at about three-thirty or so, she left again. I found out later that was when the firemen called and asked her to go to the bar. She didn’t leave before that.”
“All right. I’ll need the name and phone number for your friend.”
“Her name’s Maya. I can text you her number. I don’t have it memorized.”
Ben stiffened, and alarm bells clanged. Not the literal ones he heard every day from the fire station. The figurative, father ones that told him he wasn’t going to like the answer to his next question.
“Maya what?”
“Mansfield.”
Ben slumped in his seat.
“Um…also, I don’t think her dad knows about this, so if you could, you know…”
He took a deep breath and willed himself to remain professional and calm. He put the information aside to deal with later.
“Anyone else at the party who could vouch that Lizzie was there?”
“She was pretty much in and out, but there was one guy that would probably remember her. Lizzie pulled him off my friend and threatened him. I know his name, but don’t have his number.”
Ben sat up straight, instantly alert. When she didn’t elaborate, he pushed. “I’m listening.”
“Oh, um. Well, my friend was in kind of a sticky situation. You know, with a guy. Lizzie got in his face to make him leave her alone.”
“Your friend Maya?”
“Yeah.”
Ben’s blood began to boil. With disappointment that his daughter had been drinking. With rage that some guy had to be pulled off of her. And with sadness that Maya hadn’t trusted him enough to confide any of this to him. He took another deep breath.
“Okay, Bella,” he said. “Thank you for your time. Can I call you with any other questions?”
“Oh, sure. I don’t want Lizzie to get into trouble. She didn’t start that fire. If you knew her at all, you’d know she could never do such a thing.”
Not wanting to comment on that, he said goodbye and hung up. The pieces fell into place. Bella must be the new girl on the basketball team that Lizzie and her family had been cheering for. He’d heard Maya talk about her but never actually met her. Ben wondered if Bella was the reason Maya got into trouble. As far as he knew, she’d never been into partying.
Luckily, he had the afternoon to calm down before confronting Maya. That evening, she returned from practice and was babbling about something or another that some teacher had done.
“Maya, honey. Sit down.”
“This doesn’t sound good,” Maya mumbled. He shot her the “dad” look, and she shut up and sat.
“I had an interesting conversation about what happened Saturday night with your friend Bella today.”
Maya’s eyebrows jumped to her forehead. “What? Why?”
“I needed to ask her some questions about her cousin, whose bar burned down that night.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about Lizzie’s bar.”
“You know Lizzie?”
“I mean, not really. But she seems cool.”
“Bella told me about the drinking.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. I was going to tell you,” Maya said. “I just didn’t know how. And I was worried if too many people found out, I’d get kicked off the team.”
“We’ve talked about this. You said drinking was dumb. Did Bella talk you into it?”
“What? No. Bella’s a bigger goody two-shoes than I am. If anything, it was my fault.” She sighed. “Drinking is dumb. I got really sick. I swear, I’ll never do it again.”
Ben was quiet for a second. “It kind of hurt worse that you didn’t think you could tell me.”
“Dad. It’s not like that. Didn’t you ever keep things from your parents when you were a teenager?” He considered that a rhetorical question because she already knew he had. “I may not be old enough to legally drink, but I am almost an adult.”
“Maybe in the eyes of the law. You’ve still got a lot of growing up to do.” He hesitated before bringing up the other thing. “What about this guy?”
Embarrassment washed over her. “It was so stupid. I was so stupid. I shouldn’t have let myself get into that situation. I mean, it wasn’t so bad I had to fight him off or anything. I just didn’t want to cause a scene or make it a big deal.”
“It could have easily turned into a big deal, Maya. Drunk boys don’t make good decisions. Neither do drunk girls.”
“I know, I know. Believe me, I know. You should have seen Lizzie, Dad. She’s like a foot and a half shorter and half this guy’s weight, and she still scared the crap out of him. She was fierce.”
“She didn’t think telling your parent would be a good idea?”
“Honestly, Dad, we barely talked. We were all exhausted during the car ride that night, and I left before she came back in the morning. Lizzie told Bella to tell me that I should talk to you, and I said I would.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Gonna add lying to your list of sins, I see.”
“I would have told you.” She looked away. “Someday.”
Ben sighed. “Look, I’m glad she was there. But that doesn’t change the fact that you shouldn’t have been. At the party, in a room, alone with a boy.”
“What’s my punishment?”
“You’re grounded for a month. School and basketball only. Understood?”
“A month?” she exclaimed. “That’s way too long.”
“I could take your phone away.”
“No. No.” She held up her hands in surrender. “A month sounds fair.”
“That’s what I thought. You ready to eat?”
Maya was abnormally quiet over dinner. He figured she was mad at him about the grounding, but he soon discovered she had something else on her mind.
“Dad, what are you going to do when I go away to college?”
“Whaddya mean? I’ll be fine.”
“Can we revisit you getting an online dating profile? You need to find someone. A nice woman to keep you company.”
“Humph. I’ll tell you what I don’t need is dating advice from my daughter.”
Her eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands together once. “I just had a brilliant idea. You should ask Lizzie out. She’s really pretty.”
He held up a hand. “This conversation has gotten away from me. Bedtime.”
“It’s seven o’clock.”
“Fine. Dishes, then homework, then bed.”
She rolled her eyes but got up and went to the kitchen. While she loaded the dishwasher, he announced he was taking Jasper out to pee.
Their elderly beagle meandered around, taking his time to find a place to do his business. Ben zipped up his coat against the November chill. Date Lizzie. What a joke. Not in a million years.
He reluctantly concluded that unless Lizzie had set the fire to start on a timer, she was not the arsonist. However, just because she didn’t actually light it didn’t mean she wasn’t involved. She could have hired someone to do it.
He’d spent the afternoon checking out the contacts on her phone and skimming text messages. Based on their context, the majority were conversations with her family, a few to and from her employees, and more than a handful from men asking her out.
After reading through two months of personal messages, he felt he knew her a little. Her sense of humor was dry and sarcastic, much like his own. He literally laughed out loud at some of her comments to her sisters. She turned down most of the date offers but was nice about it. Always seemed to make it seem like they were better off without her.
He’d gone back several weeks and hadn’t seen anything that pointed to an arson plot. The deleted stuff he recovered was all junk and spam calls. That meant he had to step up his game to find the real culprit.
Tomorrow, he would call and offer to return her phone. He didn’t want to admit that he looked forward to seeing her again. Maya was right, Lizzie was pretty. Not that he’d do anything about it.