Chapter 57

Who is Matt Pye?
What does he want with me? Is he trying to kill me?
As soon as Kelloway went to bed, Rawle fired up the computer in his office. He was not able to stop his heart from pounding and there was no way he could settle his nerves enough to sleep. Not until he understood what was happening to his family.
He’d managed to clean up the suction canister and fluid and Porkbutt’s fur and feet, and all the syringes without having to tell Kelloway what happened.
Thank God for the distraction powers of Oprah. He’d told her some local brats were playing Nicky nicky nine door and that he was outside playing catch with the dog.
Why was Matt Pye attacking my family? What if Athan had been the one to discover the needles? What if he put his hand in the bush?
Rawle couldn’t believe someone would do something so crazy as to put his son in danger.
He had sworn an oath to God two years ago, when he first saw Athan jerk to life in the delivery room, that he would kill any man who tried to harm his baby.
Now that easy oath was being tested, for real.
The instinct to protect his family boiled in his throat and chest like a kettle of oil.
He sat staring at the computer screen, listening to the shouts and bass music of a nearby Acadia party out the window, and feeling it beat inside him like a drum.
He felt like such a pussy. Someone was literally attacking his family and he was letting it happen. They already hurt his wife.
What are you going to do about it, you fucking pussy?
Rawle knew Matt Pye had to have some connection to Darroll Missions’ mother.
The Gazette had something called an Outside Archive, a secure website where Rawle could search old stories without having to phone up the newspaper’s Library in Halifax.
All stories and photos that had appeared in the paper since 1996, including all wire stories, were searchable in the archive, by byline, date, section and keyword.
Rawle had the Outside Archive save dunder Favorites. He brought up the page and type dinhis username and password, then searched using the keywords: “Matt Pye,” and then “Matt Pye + security guard,” then “Matt Pye + Kentville,” hoping to narrow it down to local Valley stories.
There were a few results for each search, but nothing with the words ‘Matt’ and ‘Pye’ together as a single person’s name.
Pye was a fairly common last name in Nova Scotia and it was always a long-shot to assume that someone would have had their name in the newspaper.
He was hoping Pye had been convicted of a mildly serious crime. If he had, chances were good his name would show up in the court briefs.
No luck.
He decided to drop the “Matt” and tried simply “Pye + Missions + Valley Bureau.”
One story.
Jesus. He scanned the photo cutline and saw a familiar name immediately: Missions. And Darroll.
He clicked the title of the story to see the whole thing instead of just the summary.
‘Church family’ gets new lease on life’ the story was called. It was a Valley Bureau article, dated October 2, 1997, written by the old bureau chief Gerry Godsoe, who was long retired.
The accompanying photograph was of the “Missions family,” standing in front a tiny house in the woods. The woman was named Darlene and her husband was Willy.
She was shaped like a Coke machine and had a scary looking fish-face with a short, blonde dyke haircut and dark circles under her eyes. Her eyes were blistering with insanity, even through the camera lens a decade ago. She had a metallic, unstable, penetrating stare, like a hallucinating person might have. Her stare held onto Rawle like a drowning animal.
Willy stood like an ogre, beside her, in a ballcap, jeans and a white T-shirt that failed to cover the bottom of his belly. The kids looked like a bunch of shaved hound dogs.
It was a common joke in Wolfville that such-and-such a poor South Mountain family was inbred, but with the Missions family, their fetal-pig ugliness alone seemed to prove the jokes were true.
The kids were identified in the cutline as: Darroll, 9, Kurtis, 7, Leon, 2 and Alden, 1.
The baby boys sat together in the dirt at the foot of Darlene’s tight 80’s jeans with dirty faces and mud-people eyes. The whole family had the same ugly brown eyes.
Rawle’s attention swiftly clicked over to another man who was standing in the photograph, beside Willy. A huge, smiling, benevolent-looking man dressed in a white shirt and dress pants, identified in the cutline as Rev. Tobias Pye, of Melanson Mountain Fundamental Baptist Church.
Son of a… Rawle’s heart began to pound.
Tobias Pye.
Rawle quickly devoured the content of the story.
According to Godsoe’s prose, the Missions family of South Mountain had been discovered living in the ruin of a tiny abandoned Baptist church in Greenfield. The church was a one-room job with half the roof caved in, no plumbing, no lights, no electricity and only a rusty cast-iron rubbish stove for heat in which they burned chunks of stolen fence post and logs cut from old telephone poles.
Child Protection Services had intervened and taken a daughter, Tina-Lynn, from the family but left everyone else and moved them into a church basement.
Rev. Pye’s congregation rallied to the family and raised enough money to build them an 800-square-foot “house” on a cleared piece of woodlot on Melanson Road, on property owned by the church. The church also pledged to pay for the family’s prescription medicines and help set up abuse counseling for Willy and drug and alcohol counseling for Darlene, the story said. Darlene’s narcotic addiction was described as so severe that she had cut off both her baby toes and a baby finger, over the years, to get Dilaudid from the hospital.
The family would not have to pay rent or property taxes, and would live off $400 a month from a disability cheque Willy got for schizophrenia.
He took the small ID photo he had of Matt Pye and held it up to the computer screen.
Rev. Tobias Pye was an unbelievable mountain of a man.
Matt Pye was the spit from his ugly mug.