What Happened to the Bennetts

In bed that night, Jason notices Lucinda on Next Door, a social media service that does not show whether a user is active. She reads that Allison’s friends have been texting her and their moms have been calling other moms. Lucinda desperately wants to let her closest friend, Melissa, know what has happened.

On TV, a news program reports that a strip mall is on fire, and they recognize Jason’s office. The fire started at night, and nobody was hurt, but Jason worries about his employees and whether they will be able to collect severance. He thinks about building the business from the ground up and how everyone who worked there was like family to him.

Dom calls them with news. Their house was burned down, too, and Lucinda’s photography studio was vandalized. Wiki shows them a video of their house burning, and Jason thinks about the history of the house and the family memories there. Dom explains that such a coordinated attack means Big George believes that Jason killed his son.

Lucinda accuses the FBI of doing a poor job. She asks how the fire happened if they have agents watching the house, and Dom and Wiki have no answer. Dom explains that their only jurisdiction is to protect the Bennetts, but Lucinda asks who is going to protect her mother or her friends because they can be easily identified on Facebook. Dom admits that they have not anticipated this level of response, but he and Wiki promise that they will defend Jason’s, Lucinda’s, and Ethan’s lives with their own.

That night Jason catches Lucinda on Facebook. She had signed in using an old intern’s account. She shows Jason everything her friends have been posting about them, wondering what has happened and wishing them well. Melissa’s Facebook post about them has 175 comments. Some of the comments are trying to guess what happened. They reference “foul play” and unsavory rumors (106). Lucinda worries that their friends will keep looking for them if she doesn’t tell them what happened. She is mad at the FBI for letting the house burn down. She is mad at Jason for bringing them to Delaware. She is worried that Ethan is not handling his sister’s death well. But Jason reminds her that the danger is real, and Lucinda calms down. They talk about Allison until they fall asleep.

The next morning, Jason goes downstairs and looks for news about the fires on his laptop, but there isn’t any. Then he pulls up the photo he took of Dom’s video and examines the car. He thinks it is a BMW with a vertical dent on the corner of the bumper. Then Jason looks up recent cases involving Junior and Milo. He begins mapping out all the places where the GVO has been suspected or caught selling drugs.

Dom arrives but has no updates. He asks about the family, and Jason admits that they are worried about Ethan. Dom offers to arrange for a therapist and tells Jason that he cares about them. He also recommends that Ethan speak with Wiki because Wiki can tell him facts about the marsh. Jason, noticing Dom’s gun, asks him if he’s a good shot. Dom says, “the best” (113).

Dom then asks if Jason wants to go on a run. Jason says no because he associates running with Allison. They used to run three times a week and gossip about school. But Dom convinces him that he needs to stay strong for Lucinda and Ethan: “You gotta get them through this” (116). As they run, they pass by mostly empty houses (except for one home with junk on the front lawn and an old man on the porch: Mr. Thatcher). Jason gets tired quickly, which Dom attributes to grief. He explains that he went through something similar once. While working undercover, he lost his partner. He tried to go back to work but discovered he was tired all the time. Finally, he went to therapy.

Jason then presses Dom on the topic of their friends. He admits that Lucinda went on Facebook and explains that their friends are investigating them. He tells Dom they need to tell Melissa because, otherwise, she will raise a posse. They are not like other people in the witness protection program. They have strong ties to the community, so the FBI should bend the rules in their case. He argues that they need to extend their protection to Melissa and Lucinda’s mother. Dom promises to ask his boss, Agent Richard “Gremmie” Volkov. Jason reflects on how much he hates having to ask for everything after being raised to be self-reliant.

Jason returns to the house to find Lucinda and Ethan in bed with Moonie. Moonie growls at Jason uncharacteristically. Ethan says that Moonie believes Jason is angry at him for causing Allison’s death, which Jason takes to mean Ethan is still blaming himself. Jason asks Ethan if he’d like breakfast or to go for a walk, but Ethan says no.

Jason then tells Lucinda that Dom is trying to get protection for her mother and Melissa. He also admits that he told Dom about her using Facebook, and Lucinda feels betrayed. They argue and mention the house fire, accidentally breaking the news to Ethan. Ethan is grief-stricken and is specifically sad about the ashes of their two previous pets: Wendy and Max. He wants to go back to the house to look for the two cedar boxes, but Jason tells him that he will ask the FBI to look. Mentioning the FBI triggers Lucinda’s anger again. In the heat of the moment, she blames Jason for everything, and Jason returns downstairs worried that their marriage is falling apart.

To clear his head, Jason goes on a walk in the marsh. He reflects on how discomforting the marsh is and compares his and Lucinda’s marriage to the “solid ground” of Pennsylvania (131). During the walk, Dom catches up with him and tells him that the FBI is putting surveillance on Lucinda’s mother’s assisted-living facility and Melissa’s street and that they are arranging to give his employees severance pay. But the boss said no to sending Melissa a message.

Jason asks to speak to Agent Volkov directly. Volkov offers his condolences but also breaks the news that Milo escaped to Mexico. Jason, upset, demands to know more details, but Volkov says he cannot divulge anything else. He asks more questions about the investigation, but Volkov gives the same response. Jason then asks about getting a message to Melissa, and Volkov repeats the standard line that Dom gave him: “It’s not procedure” (135).

Dom and Jason then call Special Agent Devi Gupta, who is at the Bennetts’ house. Gupta shows Bennett the burning wreckage through her phone, and Jason reflects on which things are important to their family. He asks if there are any little cedar boxes, and Gupta finds them. He also asks for any family photographs and for “one last thing” (138), which is not revealed in the chapter. Afterward, Dom and Jason agree that they need to trust one another.

Upset about Milo escaping to Mexico, Jason investigates connections between Mexican cartels and the GVO. He finds nothing. Then he googles his name and discovers an amateur true crime enthusiast’s blog. Someone named Bryan Krieger, who calls himself “America’s premiere citizen detective,” wrote a blog post titled “What Happened to the Bennetts” (142). The post describes the case and proposes a theory that Jason killed his family and ran off with one of his employees. This theory is also discussed in the post’s comments, mostly by other true crime enthusiasts. Krieger announces that he will head to Chester County to investigate the Bennetts’ disappearance in person.

Lucinda and Ethan finally come downstairs, and Lucinda and Jason apologize to each other. Jason takes Moonie outside. When he gets back, he sees that Lucinda discovered Krieger’s blog. She checks Facebook again and sees that some of her friends also think Jason killed his family. Ethan sees that one of the people who posted about Jason being a murderer is his friend’s parent and worries that his friends, too, might think Jason killed them.

Jason tells Lucinda that Milo escaped to Mexico. She doesn’t understand how the FBI could let that happen. When Jason tells her not to blame Dom, she gets mad at him again and asks: “Whose team are you on?” (148). Suddenly Dom arrives with pizza. Jason ordered it as a surprise, but it backfires. Ethan is upset because it was Allison’s turn to pick the topping.

After dinner, Jason is demoralized. Then he spies Wiki walking in the marsh and learns that he walks the perimeter multiple times a night. Wiki asks about Ethan and offers to spend time with him. Ethan resents every attempt Jason makes to cheer him up. He doesn’t want to go birdwatching or play video games with Wiki.

Later, on Wiki’s advice, Jason takes Ethan out to the marsh to show him a “ghost forest”: a patch of trees that were killed by rising sea water entering the marshes. Jason begins crying because the ghost forest feels to him like a convergence of life and death, and Ethan mentions that he hadn’t seen Jason cry since Allison died. They talk for a while about how sad they are about Allison and how they feel her presence sometimes. Ethan confesses that he doesn’t want to watch the funeral on TV, and Jason tells him that it’s okay. He tells him that grief gets easier, but Ethan doesn’t believe it will. He doesn’t think they can be a family anymore. Finally, they talk about potentially seeing a therapist, and Jason says he will consider it too.

Lucinda calls Jason to the agents’ apartment where they are gathered around her laptop looking at a Facebook post. Melissa visited Lucinda’s mother, Claire Romarin, and posted a picture of them. Lucinda is angry with the FBI for not telling Melissa and letting this happen. Jason asks whether Lucinda’s mother is in danger now that her location has been broadcast, and Lucinda starts to panic. She clutches at her chest and says that she might be having a heart attack. (She has a heart murmur.) Jason carries Lucinda to the car, and Dom drives to the hospital with her, because Jason cannot go with her for safety reasons.

Later, Jason waits at the house with Ethan and Moonie. Moonie growls at him, and Ethan explains that Moonie hates it there. Ethan is worried about his mother and grandmother. Finally, Dom calls and tells Jason it was only a panic attack. Everyone is relieved, but Jason feels like everything is falling apart.

When Lucinda returns home, she feels silly for overreacting and scaring Ethan. She tells Jason that Dom held her hand and that she feels less mad about Jason trusting him. For a moment, Jason feels a “glimmer” of happiness (168). Lucinda relays that a therapist told her she was experiencing acute grief and PTSD, and that the entire family should get therapy. She admits that she had been blaming herself. She feels ashamed because, when Allison was shot, Jason sprang into action, but she didn’t. She feels guilty about wanting to live. She does want to live, but she feels that everything is “wrong” because they are leaving everyone they love behind (170).