The Match

Chapter Nine

Wilde sat next to him. Matthew kept his eyes on the cold cereal in front of him.

“I thought you and Mom were done.”

Wilde said nothing.

“I know you used to stay over. You don’t think I’d hear you sneak out?”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you,” Wilde said.

“Then maybe I don’t want to talk about PB.”

Wilde remained silent. He pulled over the box of cereal and emptied some into his palm. He ate a few pieces while he waited for Matthew to stop giving him the sullen.

“She’s involved with someone right now,” Matthew said. “I told you that.”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you.”

“Why the hell not? I’m not a kid anymore.”

“You’re acting like one.”

“Hey, I’m not the one sneaking out of the house at six in the morning.”

Matthew took a spoonful of cereal and jammed it in his mouth with ferocity.

Wilde said, “What did you mean by ‘it runs in the family’?”

“You and PB.”

“What about us?”

“Do you ever watch reality TV?”

Wilde kept his expression blank.

“Right,” Matthew said. “Dumb question. But you’ve heard of it, right? Shows like The Bachelor and Survivor?”

Wilde continued to stare.

“PB’s real name is Peter Bennett. He won a big reality show.”

“Won?”

“Yes.”

“Like a game show?”

“Not exactly. I mean this isn’t Jeopardy! Have you heard of Love Is a Battlefield?”

“Sure,” Wilde said. “Pat Benatar.”

“Who?”

“She sang the song.”

“What song? Love Is a Battlefield is a reality show.”

“You win a show?”

“Of course. Sheesh, Wilde, where have you been? It’s kind of like a contest. The show starts out with three women and twenty-one men all vying to find true love. But it’s a hard road to get there. Fierce, the host always says. Love is like a war. Guess where they host it?”

“On a battlefield?” Wilde replied with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

“Right.”

“You’re serious?”

Matthew nodded. “In the end, there is only one woman who selects one man. Destined for each other. They’re the only two standing. They get engaged right then and there. In the finale.”

“On a battlefield?”

“Yes. Last season it was at Gettysburg.”

“And this relative of mine, PB—”

“Peter Bennett.”

“Right. He won?”

“He and Jenn Cassidy, his true love.”

“Jenn?”

“Right.”

Wilde said, “Please tell me you’re joking.”

“What?”

“Peter Bennett and Jenn,” Wilde said. “Is that what PB&J stands for?”

“Clever, right?”

Wilde shook his head. “Maybe I don’t want to meet him.”

That made Matthew laugh. “They’re pretty famous. Or they were. This was like a year or two ago.”

“When he won this show?”

“Yes.”

“I assume PB&J are no longer together,” Wilde said.

“Why do you assume that?”

“Because One, I imagine — and this could just be me — that this probably isn’t a great way to meet your lifelong soulmate. On TV during a contest.”

“You’re an expert on relationships now?”

“Fair,” Wilde said again. “Harsh but fair.”

“And what’s Two?”

“Two, you got mad at me and said it ‘runs in the family.’ So I assume PB — Peanut Butter or whatever — cheated on this Jenn.”

“You’re good,” Matthew said.

“How did you learn all this?” Wilde asked.

“I’ve seen an episode or two, but Sutton and her sorority sisters watch religiously. Before every episode, they down edibles and watch and laugh their asses off.”

“So where is he now?”

“Peter Bennett?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the thing. No one knows. He’s disappeared.”

The kitchen door opened. Laila entered wearing a terry cloth robe and a frown.

“Damn,” Laila said. “I thought I heard voices.”

The two men looked at her. Matthew broke the silence.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

Laila turned her gaze on him. “Do I answer to you now?”

“Maybe you should.”

“No, I’ll continue to be the mother, you continue to be the son.”

“You broke up with Darryl?”

Laila flicked a glance at Wilde, then back to Matthew. “What are you doing home anyway? I thought you were spending the night at Sutton’s.”

“Nice deflection, Mom.”

“I don’t need to deflect. I’m the mother.”

“Well, my plan was to stay at Sutton’s, but I needed to tell Wilde something. So I came home to get the car keys and I heard noises upstairs.”

Silence.

Laila gave Wilde a look that made his next move obvious.

Wilde rose and started for the door. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

Without so much as a backward glance, Wilde headed out the back door, closed his eyes, and sucked in a deep breath. He wondered for a moment or two about the fallout of last night. He wondered what Laila had wanted, why she had called him, where she would go from here. It might be smart for him to vanish again, to not complicate her life, but thinking like that was insulting to Laila. She wasn’t a wallflower. She could figure out what she wanted or needed without him playing savior.

When Wilde hit the edge of the woods, he called Rola. It was early, but he figured that she’d be up or have her phone off. She answered on the first ring. He could hear the cacophony of morning breakfast with five kids in the background.

“What’s up?” Rola asked.

He filled her in on what Matthew had told him about Peter Bennett.

“When you say he’s missing,” she began.

“I don’t know. I need to do some research too.”

“Well, we have his name now. That should be enough. I’ll run his credit cards, phone bills, the usual. I’m sure it won’t be that hard to track him down.”

“Okay.”

“We also got a new guy at CRAW named Tony, who is good at family tree stuff.”

“Why would a security firm need ‘family tree stuff’?”

“You think you’re the only person looking for a biological parent?”

“Kids from closed adoptions?”

“Less and less. What happens is, a lot of people sign up for one of the DNA sites, mostly for the fun of it. To learn their ancestry or whatever. Ends up, they learn that their father — mostly it’s the father, though it can be the mother or both parents — isn’t really their father. Blows families apart.”

“I can imagine.”

“A lot of times, the father doesn’t even know. He thought the kid was his and he raised them and now when the kid is grown up — twenty, thirty, forty years old — he finds out his wife slept with someone else and his whole life is a lie.”

“That must get unpleasant.”

“You have no idea. Anyway, I’ll get Tony to start working up a genealogical breakdown on Peter Bennett. Someone on it may connect to you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll call you back when I have something,” she said before disconnecting.

Wilde retrieved his charged laptop from the Ecocapsule and found a spot two miles away where he could hook up to the internet without any chance of being tracked. He Googled “Peter Bennett” and “PB&J.” The sheer amount of hits overwhelmed him. Love Is a Battlefield had fathered thousands if not millions of fan pages, social media hits, podcasts, Reddit boards, whatever.

Peter Bennett.

Wilde stared at a few of the many, many images online of his cousin’s face. Did Wilde see some resemblance between his own face and Bennett’s? He did. Or he thought he did. It could be projection or want, but the darker skin tone, the hooded eyes, the shape of the mouth... something was there. Peter Bennett’s Instagram had 2.8 million followers. Wilde assumed that was a lot. There were over three thousand posts. Wilde scanned through them. Most featured a smiling Peter Bennett with a glowing Jenn Cassidy, the photographs’ composition signaling that these two were in love and rich and, for many, probably crossed the line between aspirational and envy-inducing. Wilde clicked on Jenn Cassidy’s profile link and saw that she had 6.3 million followers.

Interesting. Do women reality stars just have more fans?

He headed back to Peter Bennett’s page for a deeper dive. Bennett’s profile image featured him shirtless. His chest was waxed smooth. His stomach had the kind of chiseled six-pack that screamed show (as opposed to strength) muscles. For a couple of years, Peter Bennett had posted at least one photograph a day — him and Jenn on vacation in the Maldives, attending openings and premieres, trying on designer clothes, making extravagant meals, working out, dining in fancy restaurants, dancing in the clubs. But the posts had slowed down over the last year or so, petering out until the final one, four months ago, was a view of a large cliff with a cascading waterfall. The location was listed as the Adiona Cliffs in French Polynesia. The caption read:

That was the exact same wording used in PB’s desperate message. Little doubt now — Peter Bennett was PB.

Wilde clicked on that final posting and read the comments:

Wilde sat back. What the hell...?

He skipped back. Bennett’s photos over the previous few months were solo shots. No Jenn. Wilde traveled back. The last shot with the #PB&J hashtag featuring both of them was dated May 18. The #DreamCouple, as the frequent hashtag described them, sat in matching beach chairs in Cancun, both holding a frozen margarita in one hand and a bottle from a major tequila label in the other. Sponsorships, Wilde realized. Pretty much every photograph doubled as a paid advertisement.

After that last photo of the beautiful couple, no new post appeared on Bennett’s page for three weeks — a lifetime, it seemed, in this social media world. Then there was a plain graphic with a quote inside of it:

The total likes on his last picture with Jenn in Cancun? 187,454.

Total likes for this quote? 743.

Wilde spent the next two hours finding out as much as he could online about his possible cousin. Wilde read boards, social media, and the cesspool of all cesspools, the comments. It all made Wilde want to shower and vanish even deeper into the woods.

Staying away from the details for now, here’s what Wilde was able to glean:

Peter Bennett was a contestant on a reality program called Love Is a Battlefield. Good-looking, charming, kind, polite, modest, Bennett quickly became the season’s most popular male contestant. The ratings for the season finale — when Jenn Cassidy picks Peter Bennett over bad-boy Bob “Big Bobbo” Jenkins at the Final Battle — were the network’s highest in the past decade.

That was three years ago.

Unlike most couples who hook up on shows like this, Peter and Jenn — yes, PB&J — defied the odds by staying together. Their wedding — not to mention their engagement party, bachelor party, bachelorette party, couple’s shower, bridesmaids’ luncheon, groomsmen’s cigar night, welcome party, Stag and Doe (whatever that was), rehearsal dinner, morning-after-wedding brunch, honeymoon — were major televised and social-media events. Their entire life, it seemed, was for public consumption and commercialized, and the happy couple didn’t appear to mind that in the least.

Life was grand. All that was missing, it seemed, was a baby PB&J. The boards started speculating on when Jenn would get pregnant. There were surveys and even betting lines on whether she would have a boy or girl first. But when no pregnancy came in the next year, Peter and Jenn jointly announced, in a far more somber tone than anything Wilde had seen on their social media before, that the happy couple were having fertility issues and would deal with them the way they dealt with everything in their lives: with love and unity.

And publicity.

Peter and Jenn then began to document the medical procedures they had to endure — the shots, the treatments, the surgeries, the egg harvesting, even the sperm collection — but the first three rounds of IVF failed. Jenn did not get pregnant.

And then everything went kaboom.

It happened on the Reality Ralph video podcast in about as cruel a way as possible. Ralph had invited Jenn on his show purportedly to talk about her struggles with infertility so as to give others with the same problem some hope and support.

Ralph showed a shocked Jenn text messages, screenshots, dick shots — all, Ralph claimed, sent by Peter Bennett. Jenn grabbed the water bottle with a shaking hand.

Dead air.

Jenn removed her microphone and angrily rose from her chair.

Jenn froze.

Jenn couldn’t speak. Marnie, it turned out, was Jenn Cassidy’s younger sister. Using some of those text messages and screenshots, Marnie told a story of Peter’s steadily pursuing her until, one horrible night, Marnie had gotten drunk in Peter’s presence, really drunk. Or perhaps — she couldn’t say for sure — Marnie had been roofied.

The reaction was both swift and obvious. The hashtag #cancelpeterbennett trended in the top ten on Twitter for almost a week. A potpourri of past Love Is a Battlefield contestants took to the various airwaves, podcasts, streamers, and social media platforms to let the indefatigable fans know that they always suspected something was “off” about Peter Bennett. Some anonymous leaks “confirmed” that Peter Bennett had conned the show’s producer into thinking he was a nice guy; others claimed the producers had “created” a nice-guy Peter Bennett because they knew he was a sociopath who could play any part.

For his part, Peter Bennett proclaimed his innocence, but those proclamations got zero traction with the growing horde. For her part, Jenn Cassidy declined to speak at all, choosing instead to go into seclusion, though “sources close to her” revealed that Jenn was “devastated” and “seeking a divorce.” Jenn issued a statement asking for “privacy during this private and painful time,” but when you live your joys out loud, you don’t get to go private for the tragedies.

Wilde felt his phone vibrate. It was Rola.

“Bad news,” she said.

“What?”

“I think Peter Bennett is dead.”