The Boy (13 page)

At the station, he said he was sure his dad's friend, Jim Hoskins, would post bail for him. Hoskins refused, saying he needed to talk with Ray Cook first. On Sunday morning, Dave MacNaughton had a phone call from the RCMP telling him he'd best come to the Cook residence before returning to his client.

Half the town was there, he said. They were taking out the bodies.

Dave MacNaughton went back to the cells with one of the RCMP officers.
When they told Robert Cook his father was dead and they were charging him with murder, he broke down. It was claimed afterwards that he didn't show much emotion, MacNaughton told me, but in fact, Cook broke down and cried.

Dave MacNaughton was two years fresh from law school when he met Bob Cook. He'd never handled a murder case, and he decided he wasn't going to risk someone's neck on his shortcomings. So he enlisted Giffard Main as senior counsel. Still, Cook ended up with his neck in the noose, MacNaughton mused. If he'd been tried a year later, he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment. He was the last man hanged in Alberta and only two others in Canada after him.

I remembered from Pecover's book that one of Cook's lawyers, MacNaughton, Main, Dunne, or perhaps all of them had said they couldn't help but like Bob Cook. MacNaughton told me Cook was polite, respectful, all the way through from the preliminary hearing to the trials. After the first trial he thanked his lawyers even though he'd been found guilty. He couldn't understand why the jury convicted him.
He wrote a poem about it all. Dave MacNaughton said he had a copy of the poem. When he left the room to find it, I looked out at the snow. The sun was bright now, and the sky that milky blue of winter. I imagined walking the dog down to the mailbox. I had no idea if there was a mailbox but it seemed like a good thing to do on a winter day. I imagined children growing up here, building tree forts in the big grove of aspen I'd glimpsed as we'd passed the doorway to the family room and kitchen with large windows looking to the back of the property. I remembered that Clark Hoskins had built tree forts with Gerry Cook. I wondered if they'd ever ridden their bikes out of town and down this road. I remembered the large families, the small houses, and wondered if they had bikes. I wondered what Daisy Cook would have said about this house.

Then Dave MacNaughton was back, and pulled a faded photocopy from the file in his hand. I scanned the first page. Robert Raymond Cook was no great poet, but there was a sad poignancy to his attempt to convince the world of his innocence. Waiting for execution, he declared his serious doubt that there was such a thing as justice.

The file folder also contained newspaper clippings, one of them with a photo of a row of children's shoes. One of the RCMP officers had lined the shoes up for the picture, MacNaughton said, and the prosecution tried to get the photo admitted as evidence. As if it was necessary to wring more sympathy out of this case. There were enough photos, MacNaughton said, that were positively horrific.

On the same newspaper page as the shoe photo there was mention of numerous confessions to the crime over the years. MacNaughton waved his hand dismissively. There had been confessions from England, from the United States. None of them at all possible, and a common occurrence in a “big murder” with wide publicity. The rumour most commonly cited locally was that Bob Cook's uncle had confessed on his death bed. Nothing to that one either.

That brought us round to family. Did Robert Cook talk about his family, I asked. About his stepmother? Daisy?

Finally!

He talked about his dad, MacNaughton said. They seemed to have a good relationship. Dave MacNaughton hadn't known Ray Cook at all, but knew one of his former employers very well. The father had a reputation for being light-fingered. Missing tools from the place of work, car parts, that sort of thing. MacNaughton said that when the white shirt found under the mattress turned out to be a mystery, he'd wondered if the answer was something as simple as Ray Cook having lifted it from a car he was fixing. And he just took it home because nobody had ever worn it.

The origin of that filthy white shirt hidden under the blood-soaked mattress, along with Robert Cook's suit, had remained a missing piece of the puzzle. There were some other pieces of evidence that were never explained.

Yes, MacNaughton said, and those pieces had caused a lot of trouble. Bob claimed that when he came back to Stettler he dropped in at home, had a beer, picked up some suitcases his folks had left behind, and put them in the trunk of the car. But one of the police officers who'd stopped him in Camrose earlier that afternoon had searched the car, claimed there were already suitcases in the trunk. Yet another witness from Edmonton who'd ridden briefly with Bob Cook in the old station wagon before he traded it in said there had been no suitcases in that trunk. Who to believe? Bob just made things up as he went along, MacNaughton said. They all do.

Yes, they do. All of that legion of liars to which Danny belongs.

A merry band of men? Bob Cook told MacNaughton that he never robbed individuals. Just Treasury Branches.
The lawyer had a twinkle in his eye, almost a note of admiration in his voice when he talked about this young man he'd defended. That same fondness that seemed to spill into all of the comments from people who'd known Robert Raymond Cook, from prison guards, to his jailmates, to the pastors who were with him at the end.

And such loyalty from his colleagues in crime. Jim Myhaluk was a good friend of Cook's. He came to MacNaughton's office after Cook was charged and asked what he could do or say to help. When MacNaughton pressed him as to what evidence he could offer, he said he'd come up with whatever would be best for his pal. Just tell him what to say. That's the kind of guys they were, MacNaughton said. Whatever they could come up with to get him out of the jam.

Bob Cook, he said, had an answer for everything as quick as you could ask the questions. When he was captured after the escape from Ponoka, he told the police Myhaluk had helped him. MacNaughton discovered that Myhaluk had been in jail that night so he asked Cook what the real story was. Cook said that when he was in the lock-up at Ponoka, standing there at the window, he noticed that the bars moved a bit. The grout was loose. He just waited until it was dark, and he had no problem breaking out. And of course no problem getting a car started when he found one. His rationale for making up the story about Myhaluk? The police seemed to really want him to say that he had help. He told them what they wanted to hear.

On my trip to the Hanna cemetery, I'd wondered who stood there at the graves the day the seven were buried. Dave MacNaughton had no idea who'd arranged the funeral. He'd never spoken with anyone in the extended family. Not Ray Cook's family, nor that of Josephine Cook, Robert's mother. No one in the family came anywhere near Robert Raymond Cook after the murders.

I'd been to the cemetery, I told him. And he, with a grin, said I probably didn't find anyone there who could tell me anything. Bob had sent him on a wild goose chase through a cemetery too.

One of the unresolved pieces of evidence was around money Cook claimed to have dug up from a buried stash somewhere near Bowden—the loot, or swag, they called it variously in court—from the Vegreville Treasury Branch heist that had landed him in the Prince Albert penitentiary on his last incarceration. Cook told MacNaughton the can was still buried. If MacNaughton would just arrange a bit of a leave of absence he could take him there. To the exact spot. That, of course, was not remotely possible, so Cook supplied directions instead. MacNaughton said he went out with a shovel and the map, and ended up in a cemetery. He didn't find the money.

He was quiet for a minute, waiting for me to ask another question, but I was still back in Hanna, staring at the stone on the grave. Thinking about the funeral.

Did Cook ask to see them? I was thinking out loud, I realized suddenly. Did he see their bodies?

Dave MacNaughton raised an eyebrow, that same twitch of a smile. No, he said quietly, not afterward anyway.

I sat up a little straighter.

He shifted slightly in his chair. Bob told them what they wanted to hear, he said. He could have taken a lie detector test and I'm sure he would have passed it.

About the escape from Ponoka?

That too. About any of it.

About the murders?

Yes. Because he didn't believe he did it.

Do you? I asked.

He barely hesitated. Yes, he said. But he felt it was the same sort of situation he'd seen where someone had been raped or suffered some other brutal experience and then totally blotted it out of their mind. Cook had been in a fight with another prisoner just a few months before, and still had the scar on his forehead. He was a boxer in prison too. That was an angle MacNaughton said they followed. They thought the blow to his head in the prison brawl or the boxing matches might have caused brain damage. But Cook wouldn't even consider an insanity plea. He didn't do it. He wanted to take the stand.

I'd heard that MacNaughton had remained a staunch defender of Cook. Did he think, from the beginning, that his man was guilty?

The evidence came together slowly, MacNaughton said. Cook
had a good story about the car and he wasn't acting when he broke down and cried when he was told about the deaths. There was very real anguish when he cried for his father. Dave MacNaughton was sure that so far as Robert Raymond Cook knew in his own mind, he had not killed his family. But the evidence was so strong neither jury took any time at all in reaching their conclusion.

Bob Cook was a good liar too. He could have said his name was Dave MacNaughton and passed a lie detector test, the real MacNaughton said.

But in the end, it was the lies that did him in? Did you ask him that?

It was the death penalty that did him in, MacNaughton said. Look at Colin Thatcher. He's out. Bob would have been out in twenty-five.

Colin Thatcher had spent twenty-two years in jail for the murder of his wife in Saskatchewan in 1983. He maintained his innocence throughout. I remembered with a jolt that Joanne Thatcher was shot and bludgeoned to death. But throughout Thatcher's imprisonment, members of his family stood steadfastly behind him.

Mrs. MacNaughton came upstairs then, and into the living room with a smile and a welcome. We chatted a minute about the weather and the roads. I wondered if they had prearranged signals, these two, whereby she would interrupt after an hour as my cue that it was time to go. But after she'd left the room, her husband settled back into his chair. Who else had I spoken with, he asked, and what other information was I looking for? Possibly he could find some other contacts for me.

I hadn't found any members of the family, I told him. There had been a number of people who'd suggested that poking around in someone's tragedy was in bad taste.

Murder is in bad taste.

All these wry comments, I wished I'd had the chance to hear him on the bench.

The thing about capital punishment is that there's no comeback if you are innocent, he said now. Look at Milgaard.

For a few minutes he talked about David Milgaard who'd been imprisoned for the murder of a nurse in Saskatchewan in 1969. Twenty-two years later he was finally released and DNA evidence proved him not guilty. During those twenty-two years, David Milgaard's mother never gave up the fight. She was still beside him during the long inquiry into what went wrong in the case. There was no one left to stand beside Robert Raymond Cook. Not one family member who ever made contact.

But then Joyce Milgaard believed in her son's innocence.

Ah yes, and she was his real mother. There is a difference.

MacNaughton said he'd never understood the Milgaard case. Why Milgaard's counsel, who later became the Chief Justice in Saskatchewan, never called him to the stand. The reason you don't call someone to the stand, he said, is that you know he's guilty. If he's confessed, but you're hoping to get him down from murder to manslaughter.

Or he's guilty but by reasons of temporary insanity?

That was an interesting twist as far as Ponoka was concerned, he said. Up until the day Cook escaped, the psychiatrist maintained that he hadn't finished his assessment, but when it came to court, there were complete reports.

His escape brought them to the conclusion that he was sane?

Apparently. It certainly brought him to a conclusion.

The judge was beginning to look tired, I thought. It was time to finish. I asked him if he'd visited Cook in Fort Saskatchewan. He had. Had he been there at the end? He shook his head slowly. He didn't have the guts he said, and had regretted it ever since. There were two pastors with Bob Cook when he was executed. They'd spent several months visiting him, and had come to know him well.

We both looked toward the window. It was only 2:30 but the sun was getting low.

When I was back in the car, I drove onto the main road, and then pulled over to write a few more notes. Although it would be there on the tape, there was one thing I wanted to be sure I remembered. There was no one, he'd said. Nobody. Bob was strictly on his own.

The Boy

Louise's past contacts with lawyers have involved no more than a few quick office visits to close a real estate deal, and the gentle guidance of the family friend who was her dad's lawyer and helped her when she was executor of his affairs. Some day she'll have the same kind of somber appointments over the probate of her mother's will. It's beginning to seem, though, that her mother is going to live forever in the fairyland she inhabits inside her head.

Now, Louise and Jake are in steady consultation with criminal lawyers over Daniel's latest charges. Juvenile hearings were humiliating enough, Jake says, always someone looking at them as though they were the problem. But now that Dan is eighteen and has graduated to adult court, there's no more pretending that he'll outgrow these boys-will-be-boys activities that get a little out of hand. They've entered a world of serious theft, break and entry, assault, and God knows what else they're going to have to listen to in the corridors of the courthouse. There's the expense as well. Legal Aid is a joke. After one attempt to get Dan hooked up with that service, Jake threw up his hands and said he'd rather pay a stiff fee for a bit of empathy and some real effort than beg for the free services of someone who was overworked and indifferent. At the end of the last hearing, the one that sent Daniel to Bowden for his current two years, the lawyer came to them with a long face and expressions of sympathy. Minutes later as they were leaving, they saw him down the hall, slapping a colleague on the shoulder, laughing, arranging a golf game. Well why not? Louise asked, when Jake bristled. Wouldn't he be doing exactly that if it wasn't his son who'd just shuffled out of the room en route to jail? She struggled to hide her relief that Danny would be out of their lives for another two years.

No one asks about Dan anymore. Louise is sure there's a consensus down at the coffee shop that the judge made a good call. The scrawny boy with the feral look has turned into a lanky teenager with a bad attitude, someone other parents warn their own kids to stay clear of. Not that any young people in town ever sought him out.

At least the last break-in was in Edmonton, not the general store up the street, or Henry Schultz's garage or some farmer's machine shed. Still a loner, but Dan seems to run into the boys he knew at the treatment centre every time he goes to Edmonton. Is it any wonder, Jake said, that he hangs out with a bad crowd? A boy needs friends, and if the good kids will have nothing to do with him, well then he'll look for company somewhere else. Unfortunately, the last company he hooked up with enlisted Dan's help in breaking into a video store in a small strip mall. According to Dan. According to one of the other boys, the only one who was still a juvenile and ended up back at the centre in Calgary instead of in jail, Dan was the mastermind behind the plan.

Louise groans when she hears this. “Does a mastermind leave a calling card?” Dan's wallet was found on the sidewalk outside the store. No doubt it slipped out of his jacket when he was stuffing electronic games into his pockets.

“Well what do you want, Louise?” Jake snaps back at her. “A sophisticated bank heist? This is kids' stuff. It always has been.”

“And always will be? You really believe that, Jake?” She can hardly speak. He is going to continue denying that Dan is in serious trouble. Her affable, reasonable, good citizen of a husband, still believes that the world is ganging up on his kid? She takes a deep breath. “It's going to get worse, Jake. Now there's drugs, alcohol.”

He holds up his hand, head shaking so vehemently his face is a blur. “Dan says he does not do drugs. Maybe there's booze, but what teenager doesn't get drunk enough times to teach himself that the party isn't worth the morning after?”

“And you believe him? About the drugs?”

“I have to.” He looks away from her, lips like a ridge of ice. “The rest of you have given up on him already. He's eighteen years old!”

Exactly. Danny is eighteen now and shows no sign of the maturity she's prayed would turn him around—everyone in town had cited some local kid who'd been “turned around” at the magic age of eighteen—nor does he show any interest in the jobs his dad keeps finding for him, or the counseling of a whole army of social workers and probation officers.

So far as Jon and Lauren are concerned, Danny, the big brother who flitted in and out of their life, is an adult now, no longer in “school.” But how much longer, Louise wonders, before someone tells her five-year-old son that his brother is a jailbird.

Louise gave up on convincing Jake to move back to the city while he was so torn up with Danny's troubles, but she re-opens the debate, this time with the other two children's futures at stake. “There are more school options for them in the city,” she argues. “More options for me too.” She could get a job at either the elementary school in Valmer, or the high school in the neighbouring town to which the Valmer students are bussed, but she does not want to teach children whose families she knows, nor does she want to run into her students at the coffee shop. Jake doesn't get it.

“You still don't understand, do you?” he asks, genuinely puzzled, she can tell. “That's the advantage of living out here. Your life doesn't have to be compartmentalized. I'm sure that if Danny had grown up out here with cousins and people he knew around him from the time he started school, things would have been different. It's about growing up with people who care about you.”

“It's possible,” she says carefully, slowly, “for people to know you too well, and to fail to really see what's happening. Haven't you noticed that horrendous crimes happen in small towns, too, and that when something awful happens within a family, everyone claims they were just ordinary people?”

“If it's any comfort to you,” Jake says, his voice chilling her in spite of the warm June day, “Dan says you couldn't pay him to come back here and live with us. He doesn't feel welcome. I'm going to visit him on his birthday next month, but don't feel you have to come along.”

She feels her face redden. She has never visited Danny in his incarcerations. Not in juvenile detention, not at the group homes, and she can't imagine sitting in a grey room at Bowden trying to make pleasant talk with her stepson. She's talked with Phyllis about this, and Jake's cousin shakes her head. She doesn't see any point to it, she says, and then waffles around trying to find a tactful way of saying that Danny would probably rather have his dad to himself, even in these pathetic circumstances. No, Phyllis assures her, she shouldn't feel guilty. Bad enough a father has to go to such a place, and perhaps she'll suggest to Paul that he offer to go with Jake, just to let him know that he isn't alone in all this.

So Louise buys birthday presents; running shoes Danny requested, books, chocolate. Jon wants to give his brother a deck of cards. Danny, Jon reminds his mom, just loves playing Go Fish with him, and maybe some of his friends like playing too. He and Lauren spend an hour making birthday cards. At the end of it, Lauren asks, “Who's this for again?”

When Louise reaches up into her bedroom closet to find the wrapping paper she keeps there, her hand lands first on the scrapbook full of Brenda's clippings about the Cook murders. Just for a second, she flips through the pages, and pauses on the photo of a row of shoes; a tiny pair of mary janes, a little girl's party shoes, three pairs of generic-looking boys' running shoes, a mother's scuffed pumps, and the worn work boots of the dad. Who, she wonders, thought there was artistry in lining up the footwear of a dead family? Surely the murderer didn't amuse himself thus. When she hears Lauren's chirpy voice in the hallway, she stuffs the file under the heap of laundry on the bed and takes the wrapping paper out to the living room. No balloons or birthday cakes for Dan, Jon tells her seriously, and chooses instead a slick sheet printed with red racing cars.

Later, when the kids are settled in front of the television watching
Blue's Clues
, Louise goes back to the bedroom. She folds and puts away the pile of clothes on the bed, and finally sits down to look at the clippings again. With her eye on the clock, Jake due home in another hour, she skims through articles, barely able to read the account of the discovery of the bodies, and finally stopping at the story of Robert Cook's escape from the Ponoka mental hospital. A stepson, so jealous of the new family that usurped his father's love, that he flew into a rage and murdered them all. But did he? Because the articles also offer up dissenting opinion, doubts about the conviction. “Hometown still divided on guilt” one headline reads.

“Mommy?” Louise looks up, startled, at Jon. “Can we make a cake for Danny?”

“A cake?” She glances at her watch. “I don't know, sweetie.” She's about to say that she doesn't know if they're allowed to send a cake. Isn't that the old movie cliché, the file baked into a cake? She imagines Danny escaping from Bowden, running barefoot through the countryside the way Robert Raymond did all those years ago. Except he wouldn't be barefoot; he'd be wearing the expensive pair of running shoes his dad brought along with the cake. A far cry from the plain sneakers worn by the little Cook brothers. “We'll ask your dad,” she says. “He'll be here any minute, so I'd better get the spaghetti on.”

At dinner, Jon mentions the birthday cake again. “I don't know, buddy,” Jake says. “It's a nice idea, but this place where Dan's staying it's kind of …there's a lot of guys there, so maybe it would be better if I just took a piece of cake instead of the whole deal.”

“Can I come?”

“Not this time, son.”

He sounds so weary Louise doubts he's even registered what Jon was asking. Not this time, not ever. She's sure Jake can't imagine taking this sweet boy inside the walls of a prison any more than she can. Jake came home from the last visit to Bowden white-lipped and furious. The visitors were kept waiting for almost two hours for no apparent reason. Little children waiting to see their dads, cranky and tired and hungry by the time they were allowed in. “Helluva way to run a railroad, is all I can say,” he muttered, and remembering that now strengthens Louise's rock solid conviction that neither she, nor Jon nor Lauren will ever make that trip. She will make sure they never visit the scummy world of their half-brother.

“But here's an interesting coincidence,” Jake continues, looking at Louise now instead of Jon. “Remember Alice? My old neighbour in Edmonton?” It takes Louise a minute to dredge up the memory of the old woman who lived next door to Jake when she met him. The one who was happy to come over and sit with Danny if Jake had to go out, the one who gave Louise such scowling scrutiny the couple of times they met, that she was sure she failed the test of whether she was worthy of entry into the family. She nods.

“She came to the salesroom today with her grandson. The kid's just graduated from university and he's got an engineering job up north. Twenty-four years old and a big enough income to finance a brand new Tundra.” Louise shrugs. “A new truck, Louise,” he says impatiently. “Imagine a kid like that with a six digit income? Anyway, Alice is proud as punch, and wanted to make sure he got a good deal.” He twirls spaghetti around his fork, pauses with strands dangling over the plate. “When the kid was off doing the paperwork Alice asked me about Dan. She heard he was having a hard time.” Always Louise has to bite her lip when Jake talks about Dan having a hard time. Aren't they the ones having a hard time with their son? And what about the people he robbed? “To make a long story short, I told her I was going down for his birthday and she asked if I'd take a present for him, and then all of a sudden she decides she wants to come along.” All of a sudden, Louise suspects, was when Alice heard that Jake was going alone. “I'm going to make some calls and see if we can get her on his visitors' list.”

Louise nods and nods, because there is no other response. An old woman with no more than a brief connection as a neighbour will make the effort to visit Daniel in prison, and she, his stepmother, can't make herself even consider that trip.

“Good,” she says finally. “We'll send a piece of cake with the presents. And a piece for Alice too.”

In the night, Louise lies awake thinking about Daisy Cook, wondering if she ever went to visit Bobby in prison.

On the day of Jake's trip to Bowden to visit Dan, Louise packs the two kids into the car and drives out to the farm to visit with Phyllis.

Before she married Jake, Louise had close friends, most of
them teachers, with whom she went to movies, out to dinner, to the pub for a beer after staff meetings. Occasionally, a couple of her old friends drive out to see her in Valmer, shaking their heads over the change in her lifestyle, the old house with its smell of Pledge furniture polish and the lingering kitchen aromas of decades of Sunday's roasted meat.

Jake keeps urging her to hire a babysitter once a month and go into Edmonton to shop and meet a friend for lunch. But she's reluctant to leave Jon and Lauren for more than an hour or two. Her city friends are all single and Louise has moved off the common ground—men, travel, work—that consumed their conversation before. She suspects, too, that her friends feel sorry for her. Though no one has ever said as much, she knows they think she made a serious mistake, marrying a man with a problem son, and although she's kept her mouth firmly shut about Danny's further adventures, by now someone will have heard how much more deeply into trouble he's descended.