Chapter 50

There was no one answering the door.
Something is definitely up with this family.
It was like the whole Missions clan of South Mountain had gone into hiding the moment Pussylips disappeared.
Sgt. Digby was unable to get a search warrant for Pussylips’ home, but she did have a copy of a telewarrant now to arrest his son, Kurtis Missions, for breaching probation, which meant she was legally allowed to enter the premises, if she was there to arrest Kurtis.
Kurtis was listed as ‘no fixed address’ in the system, so looking for him at his parent’s house was actually quite logical.
“I think Kurtis is hiding in the basement,” Agarwal said, spitting his sunflower seeds onto the frozen snow. Fthoo.
Digby shrugged. “Let’s take a look.”
The house was a complete unknown.
Digby approached the side window, carefully. It was papered over on the inside with what looked like tinfoil.
One of the uniforms tried the handle of the front door. It was locked.
“Don’t open it,” Digby said. “How do we know the place is not booby-trapped?”
One of the Wolfville uniforms said he was vaguely familiar with the Missions family and did not believe they kept the house booby-trapped. “The house is where they live,” the constable said. “They don’t booby-trap their own place.”
“But if they bugged out of here,” Agarwal said. “They might have left a surprise behind.”
“I don’t know. There’s tinfoil all over the window,’ Digby said. “I can’t even see inside.”
The uniforms shrugged at eachother. “We could go get a robot,” the other one said. “You got one at New Minas don’t ya?”
“Fuck that,” Agarwal said. “Look at this place?” He walked over to the edge of the driveway and picked up a large white rock. The dogs took up their loud barking again, as if sensing what he was about to do.
Agarwal put the rock up onto his shoulder, like a shotput, and ran at the window. “Yearghhhhhh!-“ He heaved the stone at the window and sent it caving through, with a gushing sound of shattering glass. Agarwal ducked down after he threw the rock, as if fearing a gun would start firing. He inched up to the window pane, crouching down. He drew his gun and flipped it over the window pane, pointing his weapon at the darkness. Then he took a Maglite out of his belt and flicked the white beam inside, back and forth, up and down.
“Okay. All clear.”
Digby shook her head, smiling. “I think technically you’re supposed to make a demand-for-entry, Ross, before you heave a rock through the window.”
Agarwal leaned down yelled into the shattered window. “Can the cops COME IN?”
The uniforms chuckled and put their shoulders to the rotten door, in unison, just testing it out at first, but the hinge screws tore right out of the rotten wood. The door clattered over like a sandwich board, landing on a mound of garbage inside the house.
The uniforms immediately held their noses with their tight leather gloves.
“Gesus!” one shouted out. “It stinks!”
Digby walked carefully up the concrete step and inched between the two uniforms into the tiny dark bungalow. She looked inside. A rancid, boozy smell of rotten milk, meat and garbage bit her in the face like an attacking raccoon.
“Oh, that stinks!”
The tiny main room was piled high with about a foot thick layer of trash bags covering the floor. They completely covered the floor, glinting with pop cans.
Many of the bags had been ripped open and were spilling out loose, indistinguishable contents. Fluffy grey mold grew on the mound in several places, visible to the naked eye even in the relative darkness of the room.
Digby could feel herself began to weeze a little on every breath she took as she walked inside.
There was no clear space where she could see the floor. She scanned the cramped interior with her Maglite. All garbage.
The kitchenette was cluttered with rusty appliances.
There was a rustle sound of mice or rats moving under the garbage layer. Digby felt a buzz of revolt run down the back of her legs. Her body ordered her to turn around and run out of the building, immediately, but she disobeyed.
She stepped in further, careful not to step too hard on the uncertain mattress of trash bags. “Darlene Mission’s has a history of drug addiction. Before anyone comes in, you better have steel-shank boots, and don’t touch anything. There’s got to be needles in this stuff.”
This was not a residential home, Digby thought to herself. This was a squat or a shooting gallery. A crack house.
“Christmas,” Agarwal muttered as he moved behind her. She heard him withdraw his sidearm from his holster hanging under his arm under the suit blazer. She thought about removing her own 9mm Compact, if only to shoot anything that scurried past her feet.
It was daylight, but dark inside. The windows were covered with pads of thermal aluminum foil.
Digby flicked on a wall switch to see if there was power. To her amazement there was. A bare light bulb snapped on above their heads.
“People live in this kind of shit and pay the power bill? How is that possible?” Agarwal marvelled.
“I know, “Digby said. “It’s like a squat. If you grew up here, what kind of a nutbar would you be?”
“I’d be a fucking nut. That’s for sure.”
There was an old cast iron stove straight ahead and a wood counter top, both stained with rust-coloured meat stains. The stove had no enamel or anything on it anymore and looked like bare rusted brown iron, like they stole it out of an old train or something. There were several filthy black and tin pots scattered around, and crusts of brown food here and there, sprouting tufts of beige mold. The kitchen sink was full of rust and nothing else. It looked like it hadn’t been filled with water for ten years. There were very few actual dishes, which surprised Digby, or at least didn’t look quite right. Then there was a set of six yellow melamine bowls sitting on top of the fridge, all in a row, all turned upside down with crusted sauce up the backs of them.
“Look at the bowls. It’s like they reuse the same six bowls without cleaning them and turn them upside down to keep the flies away.”
“Haha! No one really lives like this,” Agarwal said, in disbelief. “This is a crackhouse. This is not a house where a family of six lives.”
He was looking at the walls in the living room. Someone had wallpapered the room with hundreds of strips of crisply folded tinfoil. The pattern and shinyness of the foil was almost pretty to look at. The tinfoil was definitely recent.
“People do this shit in the movies! Tinfoil! These people are so crazy it’s like they’re in the movies.”
One wall had several framed pictures hung on it. Group photos taken at a martial arts competition of some kind. There was a banner at the bottom of the photos: ‘Gottingen FMA Academy. Weapons.’
Two of the kids in each picture were circled with marker. They looked like a young Darroll and Kurtis Missions. Each was holding a martial arts weapon of some kind, either a pair of short bamboo-like sticks, wooden staffs, or a set of nunchukas.
“Looks like Kurtis and Darroll both have black or brown belts,” Agarwal said, scrutinizing one photo on the far right. The pictures were in black-and-white.
“What’s FMA?” Digby said. “Anybody know?”
Everybody shook their heads.
“I think maybe it’s Filipino Martial Arts,” one of the uniforms said as he sifted through papers in a wooden nightstand near the front door.
He brought a stack of phone-bill-style papers over to the detectives.
“Philipino Martial Arts? Wouldn’t that be PMA?” Agarwal said.
“No, you can spell Filipino with an ‘f’. Don’t you? Anyway’s, these are some stubs of some disability cheques made out to Willard Missions. It doesn’t say what disability he has though.”
“Insanity,” Agarwal said. “That’s a disability, isn’t it?” He took the papers and shuffled through them.
The sickly-sweet smell of garbage was making Digby woozy. “Ogay,” she was pinching her nose. “Do we zee anything we wanna get involbed wit here? Otherwide, I’d just as soon leabe.”
There was a washroom with a white sink stained with rust and filled with used needles on Digby’s right. The toilet was full of dark water and speckled with crusty bits of red feces or rust perhaps. One of two tiny bedrooms past the washroom was full of three huge mounds of crushed glass, like snow drifts. Digby could not for the life of her figure out how the mounds of glass got there or what they could be used for. Probably to put in people’s food.
The other filthy bedroom was stuffed to the brim with junk, foam mattresses, overflowing ashtrays and empty plastic homebrew beer bottles.
She unpinched her nose. “There’s nothing here. Let’s get out of here before we catch flesh-eating disease. I think it’s safe to say the Missions family has bugged out of South Mountain. And good riddance.”
Agarwal still had the stack of papers in his hand. “-Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a sec.” He reached out to grope for Digby as she inched past him on the shifting trash bags, keeping his eyes intently focused on a piece of paper in his hand.
“Wait, Digby.”
“What?”
“I have a name here. Powder. Isn’t that the name of that reporter you were talking about?”
He held out a carbon-backed, thin piece of computer paper. It was a pay stub. Digby took it and looked at the name. Kelloway Powder.
The pay stub was for $1,356 from the Annapolis Valley Health Authority.
The paper had been torn into four pieces and then taped back together with clear Scotch tape. It was also stained yellow in some places, from coffee or coffee grinds.
“This looks like it’s from the garbage,” Digby said. “That’s the reporter’s name. Rawle Powder.”
“How many people named ‘Powder’ can there be?” Agarwal said. “This must be his brother or his dad or something.”
Digby smiled. “I think Kelloway is a girl’s name, stupid.”
“Like Kelly? Some guys are named Kelly.”
She took a Ziplock freezer bag out of her fanny pack and placed the pay stub carefully inside. “Whoops. There’s writing on the back too.” She took the stub out of the baggie again and looked closely at the back. There was some handwriting in blue pen on a strip of the white backing. She read the writing out loud: “678-5000 switchboard. Kelloway Powder. ICU nurse. Eight to eight, days.”