Page 19 of Betting on Lizzie

“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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Finally, this jack apple was making sense. The arson investigator had called to say he needed to ask her a few more questions and hinted that she might get her phone back. Lizzie was in her office at The Tipsy Twist, working on the initial liquor order for the grand opening. Except for a couple of cases salvaged from the back storeroom, The Drop’s inventory had been destroyed and thrown out, so she was starting from scratch.

A light knock on the open door caused Charlie to bark once—her personalized doorbell. Lizzie looked up as Ben entered. She ripped off her readers, shoved them into her pocket, and stood.

Charlie hauled himself off his bed and sauntered over to greet Ben, who scratched his head and mumbled, “Hey, pretty boy.”

“Don’t get up on my account,” Ben said. He placed a hand on the back of a chair across from her desk. “May I?”

She sat and nodded. “Do I have a choice?”

“I talked to Bella and her friend. Sounds like your alibi checks out.”

“Sweet. When can I have my phone back?”

“There’s some security video I’d like you to look at first.” He passed over a handheld device that showed a still frame of the bar’s rear entry. “Push play.”

She did, and it only took a second before someone snuck into the frame. The person wore all black, including a dark-colored baseball hat, and used a crowbar-type tool to break the lock on the back door.

“You can’t even tell whether it’s a man or a woman,” she said. “And if they had to break in, it obviously wasn’t me. I have a key.”

“The boots look a lot like the ones you were wearing the other day,” he said.

She glanced at the screen. “What? I may not know much about fashion, but I wouldn’t be caught dead in those boots. The only similarity is that they’re black.”

“You recognize anything about the person? The way they walk or move?”

She watched the rest of the short video. Once the figure disappeared into the bar, she handed back the tablet. “Other than the fact that it’s not me? No.”

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