Chapter 82

Piggish nightmares and images of blood-soaked bodies- especially Tamara’s misshapen head- tormented Rawle Powder’s dreams, all night long.
He had a persistent nightmare that he was torturing somebody, pressing their face into a burning-hot car engine. Whenever he’d lift up their head from the engine block, their skin would look red and flat, and would peel off, just like Jack and Tee’s faces.
His internal stress also seemed to be emanating outward, affecting everyone in the house.
Kelloway tossed and turned all night. Athan woke up time and time again, screaming with horrible nightmares.
Porkbutt paced around the living room, all night, throwing up loudly until four or five.
In the morning, Rawle found a little pile of digested dog kibble covered in slime and two pools of yellow slime in the living room, sitting on top of the stain-resistant carpet, like stirred eggs.
He was up at the dark crack of 5 a.m., when Athan woke up for good and refused to go back to sleep.
He carried him downstairs and set him on the plastic training seat, attached to the downstairs toilet.
“Poo, pee, poo, pee, poo?” Athan chirped.
“Yes,” Rawle said, trying to sound cheerful. “Go pee.”
He stuck a new diaper around him and dropped him off in front of the cartoon channel, where Athan sat wide-eyed with a bowl of Cheerio’s, while Rawle went to work cleaning up the mucousy dog vomit with a plastic bag and a container of scented baby wipes.
This is my life.
At least you’re still alive.
The newspaper was sitting rolled up inside a pink plastic bag, resting against the front door. It was cold and blowing snow outside.
Rawle felt nervous and sick in the hollow of his stomach. His hands were shaking. He picked up the paper and carried it inside. Now he would have to re-live everything again.
He could already see the enormous font of the headline standing above a row of black trees. Kyle Verryn’s crime scene photo.
He made a pot of strong coffee, dangling the paper in its unopened bag, then sat down in the rocking chair to read.
Athan was captivated by the giggling faggot voice of Barney on TV. He devoured his Cheerio’s and every few seconds got up from his table to clap his hands and stomp his feet, the way his mother taught him to dance.
“Numbers are, every-where, dee- dee, dee- dee, dee,” Barney and the ugly kids on the show were singing.
Rawle unrolled the newspaper. The editors had stuck the fact that Jack was a Gazette reporter right in the headline.
On a subconscious level, the editors loved it when the paper became part of the story. In this case it really was, ‘though. Rawle was pretty sure Jack and Tee had been murdered because of the firebombing story. Darlene Missions, or more like someone in her family, or someone she paid. A hitman.
“Gazette reporter, wife murdered.”
The headline was blown up in massive, evil black type across the top of page one. A sub-head under the fold, under the photo, said: “Couple found in ditch beaten to death with sticks, rocks.”

The middle of the page contained an utterly huge image of the crime scene, set back a little, but Rawle could still make out the blood-covered white bodies of Jack and Tamara, in the snow.
The cops in coveralls, yellow evidence markers and blood. It all stood out starkly against the background of snow and evergreen trees.
The photograph covered the entire area above the fold. It was the biggest photo on page one Rawle’d ever seen, except the one of Pope John Paul when he passed away.
Underneath the sub-head, tucked at the bottom of the page, were two columns of text. The first paragraphs of the story, under the byline: By Rawle Powder, Valley Bureau and Kyle Verryn.
The Gazette was the only news organization in the province to have the whole story, including the names and photos of the victims, quotes from relatives, photos of the crime scene and bodies. Even a comment from longtime Gazette publisher Eliot Graham, which an editor must have inserted during the page one edit.
It was a good exclusive, but Rawle felt no satisfaction in his job, a fact which was not really that unusual. Most times, the better his stories were, the worse he felt about writing them.
He did some surfing on the Internet and saw that the story had been picked up immediately by the Canadian Press. Paragraphs of his story were appearing chunked up under different headlines on radio station and newspaper Web sites across the country: Sticks and stones break bones: cops probe reporter, wife murder.
In a sick way, he liked that one the best of all.