The Match (Wilde, #2)(54)

“What’s that?”

“You only put your DNA in that one data bank, right?”

“Right.”

“Peter Bennett put his in several, the sister said. So maybe he got other hits. You need to investigate that, Wilde. Maybe he reached out to other blood relatives. Maybe they got in touch with him.”

“Good point.”

“Back to our timeline. Peter goes on the show. He wins. He gets married to the comely Jenn. He becomes famous. He becomes rich. He’s riding high. We don’t know what he’s doing about the fact that he’s adopted. Maybe he’s forgotten it. Maybe he’s hearing from more relatives. Whatever. Peter is flying high, living the good life, and then, boom, the podcast ends it all for him. He crashes to the ground. He’s ostracized and canceled and loses everything. We know he was distraught, not just by what others say, but by the communication he sent you via that DNA site. So you add it all up—the high, then the low, the confusion, the displacement, the losing everything, including his marriage. He sinks lower and lower. He’s drowning. He tries to swim up, but then McAndrews or that DogWhatyoucallit hits him over the head again. That’s it. He’s finished. So—and now we are just theorizing—Peter finds McAndrews, kills him in revenge, realizes what he’s done, flies to that suicide cliff, jumps.”

Wilde nodded. “Not an unlikely scenario,” he said.

“But you don’t buy it.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Because you see a flaw in the logic or because you don’t want to buy it.”

Wilde shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“You’re going to see this through to the end.”

“Yes.”

“Because that’s what you do.”

“Because I don’t really know any other way. I don’t see any point in stopping now, do you?”

“I don’t. One other thing.”

“What?”

“There is something strange about that Reality Ralph podcast.”

“Like?”

“Like maybe Jenn’s sister Marnie is lying.”

“Didn’t Peter confess?”

“If we can believe Jenn,” Hester said.

“You don’t?”

Hester made a maybe-yes, maybe-no face. “Either way, we need to talk to the sister. I may have burned my bridges on that by talking to Jenn.”

Wilde nodded. “I can take a run at Marnie.”

They both reached for another slice.

“It’s odd though,” Hester said, taking a dainty bite. “As a small child, you’re found in the woods. You have no memory of how you got there. You were just, I don’t know, abandoned or whatever. You honestly believe you were in those woods for years—”

“Let’s not go through this again.”

“Let me say this, okay? I know I’ve questioned your memory in the past. So did a lot of experts. The majority concluded that you couldn’t have survived that long on your own, that you were abandoned only days or weeks, but the trauma made you think it was longer. I used to believe that too. It makes sense, when you think about it.”

“And now?”

“Now, some thirty-plus years after you were found, we learn a blood relative of yours was secretly adopted in an adjoining state—another child who seemed to have no past. So we have two babies with no background just appearing out of nowhere. That’s bizarre, Wilde. So yeah, this started out as a curiosity quest. I’ve always been dying to know your origin story even if you’ve been reticent. But now, well, now it might be something bigger. Something more monstrous.”

Wilde sat back and took that in.

Hester took a far bigger bite of the pizza this time. Still chewing, she said, “Seriously, how good is this pizza?”

“Very.”

“The secret is honey.”

“There’s honey?”

Hester nodded. “Honey, hot Calabrian soppressata, mozzarella.”

“It works.”

“Tony’s has been in town forever. You know that.”

Wilde nodded.

“And you’ve been before, right?”

“Of course.”

“Even as a kid?”

Wilde had no idea where she was going with this. “Yes.”

“But never with David.”

Boom. Just like that. Wilde didn’t reply.

“My son was your best friend. You hung out a lot. But you never came here with David, did you?”

“David didn’t like pizza,” Wilde said.

“Is that what he told you?” Hester made a face. “Come on, Wilde. Who doesn’t love pizza?”

Wilde said nothing.

“When Ira and I first moved to town—I mean, the very first day—we brought the boys here for dinner. The place was crowded, and the waiter gave us a hard time because one of the boys—Jeffrey, I think—wanted just a slice of pizza and the waiter insisted he had to order a full dinner. One thing led to another. Ira started getting impatient. It had been a long day and we were all hungry and cranky, and then the manager told us we couldn’t sit at the table because of the slice of pizza. Ira got furious. The details aren’t important, but we left without eating. Ira went home and typed out a letter of complaint. It was like two pages long, single-space. He sent it, but he never heard back, and so Ira made it a family rule that we’d never order from them or go into Tony’s again.”