Wilde felt his phone vibrate. It was Rola.
“Bad news,” she said.
“What?”
“I think Peter Bennett is dead.”
Chapter
Ten
Have you had time to Google your cousin?” Rola asked.
“Yes.”
“So you got the whole sordid PB&J story?”
“Enough of it,” he said.
“Sheesh, am I right?”
“You are.”
“Most people think he jumped off that suicide cliff.”
“And you concur?”
“I do, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because Peter Bennett is either dead or he’s really good at hiding—and most people aren’t that good at hiding. I’m still combing through this stuff, but so far, there is no activity on his credit cards, on his bills, on his phone, no ATM withdrawals, nothing. So you take all that, you add in those social media posts, that cryptic message to you, the bullying deserved or not, the pain of getting canceled and, let’s face it, hated by the entire world. You drop all of that in a blender and hit puree, and the outcome is probably something really bad.”
Wilde considered that. “Anything on his family tree yet?” he asked.
“Peter Bennett’s father died four years ago. Mother Shirley lives in a senior center in Albuquerque.”
“One of those two is my blood relative.”
“Right. He also has three older siblings. Your best bet? Peter’s sister Vicky Chiba. Vicky is also his manager or handler or something. She lives with her husband, Jason Chiba, in West Orange.”
“Got it.”
“Wilde, do you know how close West Orange is to my place?”
“I do.”
“I’m texting you Vicky Chiba’s address right now. Maybe after you see her…？”
Rola didn’t see a need to finish the sentence. West Orange was only half an hour away with no traffic. Wilde rented a car at the Hertz on Route 17 and found himself pulling up to the Chiba home before noon. He hit the doorbell. Vicky Chiba tentatively opened the wooden door but kept the screen door locked.
“May I help you?” Vicky asked.
Vicky Chiba’s hair was white. Pure and blindingly white. Wite-Out white. The kind of white that had to come from a bottle rather than age. She had it cut in a tasseled fringe running straight above the eyeline. Her arms jangled with bracelets. Her earrings were long feathers.
“I’m looking for your brother, Peter.”
Vicky Chiba didn’t look surprised. “And you are?”
“My name is Wilde.”
She sighed. “Are you a fan?”
“No, I’m your cousin.”
Keeping the screen door locked, Vicky Chiba crossed her arms and looked him up and down as though he were a purchase she was considering.
Wilde said, “Your brother Peter—”
“What about him?”
“He signed up for a DNA ancestry site.”
Her eyes flared for the briefest of moments.
“We were a match,” Wilde continued. “As second cousins.”
“Wait, why do you look familiar to me?”
Wilde said nothing. He had experienced this many times before. The story of the boy from the woods had made headlines more than three decades ago. Vicky probably would have been a young teen at the time, but once a year or so, some cable network, desperate for material, did a “where is he now” story on him, even though Wilde never cooperated.
“That means,” Wilde said, hoping to just push on, “you and I are cousins too.”
“I see,” she said in a flat voice. “So what do you want from my brother? Money?”
“You said I look familiar.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the story of the boy from the woods?”
Vicky snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “That’s how I know you.”
Wilde waited.
“You never knew how you ended up in the woods, right?”
“Right.”
“Wait”—her mouth formed an O as she got it—“so we’re related?”
“It seems so, yes.”
Vicky quickly unlocked the screen door. “Come in.”
Her décor, like her look, was what one would likely label bohemian. Chaotic patterns and untidy textures and unruly layers, swirls of colors, everything seeming to somehow move and flow, even when nothing moved or flowed. There was something that looked like a crystal ball on the table along with tarot cards and books on numerology. One wall was covered by a gigantic tapestry with a silhouette of someone sitting lotus style with the seven chakra gemstones running from the crown of the head down to the root. Or was it the other way around? Wilde couldn’t remember.