The Boy (14 page)

Phyllis, on the other hand, loves both Jake and Danny fiercely but is still able to listen sympathetically to Louise's outpouring of frustration. She is the kindest and most honest woman Louise has ever met.

Jon and Lauren are out of the car and halfway across the farmyard before Louise unbuckles her seatbelt. Phyllis bobs up in the garden beside the house, waving. “Let them go,” she calls. “Paul's in the barn. He'll herd them back if they get into trouble.”

Louise hesitates—she doubts she'll ever be relaxed enough to “let them go” without worrying—and then joins Phyllis at the tap where she's peeled off her gloves and is splashing water on her face. “Good timing,” she says. “I've had enough sun.” She nudges the pail at her feet with her boot. “I pulled some carrots and onions for you to take home. Let's put them beside the car so we don't forget.”

They go inside then, to the cool kitchen that always smelled slightly earthy to Louise. Root vegetables with the dirt still clinging, strong coffee. Phyllis sweeps a pile of papers off the table and grabs a cloth to wipe away the lunchtime crumbs. For all her saint-like Mennonite ways, she is the most casual of housekeepers. A pleasant surprise to Louise who expected to be judged by Jake's family because she didn't bake her own bread or churn the butter.

“So,” Phyllis sighs, after a long drink of the iced tea she's poured for them. “He's gone to visit Danny in the jailhouse again? You told me before, I'm sure, but how long this time?”

“Six months, but the lawyer said he'd likely be out much sooner.”

“Well that's good, isn't it?”

“Is it?” Louise says. “Will he have changed?”

Phyllis fishes a slice of lemon out of her glass and nibbles it off the rind. “What do you think it will take? They give him schooling in there, not? Maybe if something interests him…”

“We've tried to find something that would interest him for the past four years, and he says there's nothing. Absolutely nothing that appeals to him. Or no, what he says is there's nothing that's worth his while. All he wants is to make enough money to buy a car and have his own place. How likely is that for someone who's barely finished grade nine?”

“I guess he could go north. Lots of the young guys are making big money in Fort McMurray.” Phyllis frowns. “I hear that's the worst place of all to get in trouble. Drugs and alcohol and I wouldn't let any of mine go there because of the sheer danger of the work. One of the Plett boys was only up there a month before he lost three of his fingers. He's lucky it wasn't the whole hand.”

“Jake wouldn't even consider letting him go.”

Phyllis raises her eyebrows. “You think Daniel's going to let his dad make those decisions for him now he's eighteen?”

Louise looks out the window for the third time since they came inside. Jon and Lauren are at the back of the house now, playing on an old board swing that hangs from the branch of a huge laurel leaf willow. They are almost hidden under the canopy. She smiles at the idyllic picture. Then she turns back to Phyllis. “No, I don't think we have much of a say anymore.” She's glad, actually, that Danny is eighteen and there'll be no more hauling him back home. It would be easier if he moved to another city, another province, and yet she knows that would be disastrous for him. Without the touchstone of home, what hope would he have of going straight? She sighs. “He'll have to come home, though, because where else would he go?” From her chair, she watches Lauren's feet soar past the window with each push of the swing. Jon is so good at looking out for his little sister.

“Jon's present to Dan was a deck of cards,” she says to Phyllis, “so he can play Go Fish with his friends. He wrapped them up himself.”

Phyllis claps her hand over her mouth. “Oh dear Lord, you have to laugh or you're going to cry, right?”

“I wish I could laugh,” Louise says, “but the truth is I'm scared half to death.”

“Scared, why? You're afraid for Daniel? We all are, Louise.”

She bites her lip, knows she should bite her tongue. “I'm afraid
of
him, not
for
him, although there's that too. I'm afraid…” She remembers that scrapbook of Brenda's, the picture of the white clapboard house, the smiling children. “I found some newspaper clippings in with a bunch of recipes and quilting patterns of Brenda's that Jake had packed away. A murder story from a long time ago, but it seems it was someone Brenda knew.”

Phyllis's hand flies up before Louise can go on. “Cook, right? Robert Raymond Cook. I don't know why that girl was obsessed with Cook, but you should throw the stuff away. She met him once at a party when she was in high school, and she never got over the whole bloody deal. I refused to talk to her about it.” Phyllis leans forward, her work-worn hands flat on the table. “Listen, Louise. That's all past. It's nothing to you and Jake. There are plenty of folks around here who are sure the son didn't kill the family. They say an uncle confessed on his deathbed about ten years after young Cook was hanged. Stop scaring yourself without reason. There are enough real troubles to worry about without swimming around in other people's sorrows.”

“You remember it then?”

“Of course. Everybody does. Stettler's not far away and that was the biggest thing that happened when I was growing up. My God, when he escaped from Ponoka, they had every policeman in the country and the army too out there stomping around. As I remember it, he gave himself up. Just walked out of somebody's pig barn with his hands in the air, meek as could be.” She shakes her finger at Louise. “Didn't I just say you should put it out of your mind? Daniel Peters is no Robert Raymond Cook. In fact, people who knew him said Robert Raymond Cook couldn't have killed his family. Paul's aunt worked at Ponoka. She said he didn't look like any monster to her.” She stands up. “Come on. Let's go take the children for a walk. The saskatoons are ripe, and if they help me pick we can bake a pie. You'll stay for supper.”

Of course they will. Louise is not anxious to go home to the empty house.

Isn't that what they always say when someone flips out and goes on a bloody rampage? He couldn't have done it. There were no signs?

I guess it is. But who understands why a child kills his parents.

You must have some clues by now. You've been reading those creepy stories about the child murderers for long enough. And don't you dare put that book in Brenda's box of treasures!

No, Brenda wouldn't have gone looking for other stories. She was only interested in Robert Cook.

And you? Isn't that where your obsession began?

Yes, and that's where it will end, but meanwhile I keep wondering what leads a child to murder. There are the obvious answers. He was abused. He was crazy. Neither of which fits Robert Raymond Cook.

Nor does either fit Daniel, but that's no real comfort. And aren't you forgetting that Bobby Cook escaped from the mental hospital? Someone thought he was crazy enough to be sent there.

No. He was sent there because remand for psychiatric assessment to determine if he was fit to stand trial was automatic.

Exactly. Someone who murders his parents and five little brothers and sisters is definitely in need of psychiatric assessment.

Roads Back

Whenever I asked people if they remembered the Cook murders, they either shook their heads, or landed on the subject like magpies on roadkill. So many opinions on Cook's guilt, whether or not he got a fair trial, capital punishment. And a big fence down the middle, which no one straddled.

Some of the memories of the summer of 1959 affirmed my own, others conflicted. I remembered hot weather, someone else remembered weeks of cold rain. I remembered being grounded for the full two months of vacation, someone else remembered biking across town to the swimming pool every day. Another friend remembered that the swimming pools were closed. It was the summer of the polio epidemic. His youngest sister died. How could I have forgotten the other fear that hung over us? Poliomyelitis, polio, infantile paralysis, my own father had been left with a paralyzed right arm in the 1937 outbreak when he was twenty-four years old. In that last epidemic of 1959, 1,887 cases in Canada resulted in paralysis. By 1955 immunization in the form of injected inactivated polio virus vaccine had begun, and by 1962 the use of oral polio vaccine containing live weakened virus was widespread. I remembered lining up at school for both the injection, and later the oral vaccine. Possibly the Cook children were immunized as well. Safe from at least one peril.

It was no wonder that memories of that time were vivid for some, shadowy for others. Not surprising, considering the Cooks and their infamous son had been dead for so long, that many of the people who knew them were also long deceased or too frail of mind to recall anything other than the sad shame of it all. Finally, my good friend, Shirley Black, put me in touch with one of her old school friends, Doreen Scott, who happened to have been the head nurse on the psychiatric unit at Ponoka where Robert Cook was held.

She would be happy to talk with me, Doreen said, but doubted she'd have much to offer, because she'd only actually seen Robert Cook once. Doreen was seventy-two years old, still working a few shifts a week in a nursing home, and serving a couple of Anglican parishes as well. She'd gone from nursing to theology, completed a PhD just
a few years earlier, and had recently been ordained as an Anglican priest. She and her husband used to own race horses. Even if she had nothing illuminating to offer about Cook, I was sure her company was worth the trip to Lacombe. Doreen suggested we meet for lunch on a day when she had a small window of time between duties.

I asked Shirley if she would come with me. She'd watched me dig myself deeper and deeper into the story of the Cook murders, and in the years I'd been writing, Shirley had been one of the best critics I knew. Six hours of conversation in the car was bound to lead to insight.

Lacombe is just five kilometers off the main corridor between Edmonton and Calgary, the Queen Elizabeth II Highway which I travel often, but I had never had a reason to visit. I found a town that was movie-set pretty. Tree-lined streets, stately old homes, parks, and an “Edwardian” business section refurbished under the Alberta Mainstream program in 1987 with a view to preserving historic buildings. Another idyllic place to raise a family. But Lacombe is in Central Alberta, only an hour away from Stettler, and I'd been told many times that the region had more than the infamous Cook murders in its criminal history. In 1956, the Social Credit Member of the Legislative Assembly for the area gained infamy when he murdered his wife, three children, and a sailor who had the misfortune of being a visitor to the home that weekend, and then waded into a slough and committed suicide. John Clark had had a history of mental illness. So, too, did the man who murdered the Weltys, a farm couple a writing colleague, Faye Reinberg Holt, spoke of when I talked with her about the Cook murders. She grew up on a farm near Stettler, just a few miles down the road from the Weltys, who also became part of the homicidal history of the area. That farm couple made the fatal mistake of leaving their living room drapes undrawn, and were shot and killed by a young man well known in the community. He, it was discovered, had made a list of prospective victims, and Faye's dad was among them. So many people in that area with memories of violent crime, but many of them reluctant to dredge for the kind of details I was seeking.

As soon as Doreen strode into the restaurant, I was sure there would be no problem with failing memory or reticence around talking. A statuesque woman in flowing black cassock and cape and clerical collar, she swept through the room greeting people on every side, turned a warm smile on me as she approached the table, hand extended.

Doreen settled into the booth next to Shirley, and the two of them took a moment to catch up on news of their mutual friends. They'd been girls together, classmates. Then Doreen turned to me. This is so interesting, she said. She dug a book out of her bag and placed it on the table. The same one I had in front of me;
The Work of Justice,
by J. Pecover. In spite of the fact that not everyone I'd interviewed agreed with Mr. Pecover's conclusions, he'd sold a lot of books.

Now tell me all about you and what you're doing, Doreen said
.
She leaned toward me, and I had the feeling I'd be telling her my own story rather than getting hers if I wasn't on my toes. The restaurant was full. Working people, lots of jeans and a scattering of cowboy hats. Doreen seemed to know them all.

She pulled a single sheet of paper out of the book and passed it to me. She'd kept notes during her years at Ponoka, she said, thinking she might want to write about that experience some day. But she'd recorded nothing on Cook, and this was all she remembered. The short paragraph seemed a précis of what I'd already gleaned from newspaper clippings, and that one bit of information that kept surfacing as a rumour:

“It is worth noting, that about fifteen years later, after of course Robert was hung, his uncle gave a death-bed confession saying that he had committed the murders of the family.”

Doreen said she didn't know the details of the confession, but she'd heard about it many times. She hastened to qualify that most of what she could tell me wasn't based on the small contact she had with Robert Cook, but on the assessment of a psychiatrist whose report she'd read.

So we chatted over lunch, Doreen pausing frequently to wave and smile at people who entered the restaurant. To put it plainly, she said, the psychiatrist thought Cook was a “punk,” a “bad boy,” with a string of petty crimes his only accomplishment. But he didn't think that he had committed the crime. In fact, none of the staff did. It was “weird,” she said, this sense they all had of him as a young man who was just foolishly joy-riding.

Even after he escaped?

She nodded. There was such terror in the community when he was on the loose, she said, and she thought that fear was a big factor in Cook's being convicted. Even the escape, she said, wasn't his own doing. She was sure someone on
staff had helped him, someone with a grudge against the administration and problems of his own. That man was dead now—and so was Robert Cook—so she didn't think there was any point in naming him.

As for her own impression of Cook, she said that because she was a supervisor, she had less direct contact with the patients than the other staff did. “A big shot with long sleeves and cuffs and a cap,” she said with a smile. A woman on a unit that was traditionally all male, and not very popular on the unit because she was trying to make some changes. She only met Cook once, and her lasting memory of him was of “a gentle little fellow.”

She pulled her copy of
The Work of Justice
alongside her plate. A good-looking young fellow, she said, but the photos all gave the impression of a husky man, and he was really quite a small person.

Perhaps it was the suit in that particular photo that made him look more substantial, I suggested. What had he worn at Ponoka?

Pyjamas. White flannel pyjamas, and slippers made by one of the patients. His name was Ben, she said and he worked for Cy Bedard, the tailor, and made the most wonderful melton cloth slippers. The staff all bought them for twenty-five cents a pair. Robert Cook wasn't allowed to wear day clothes. His blankets were probably made out of canvas sturdily sewn together out of strips—so he couldn't hang himself. She winced. What irony. Meals came with plastic spoons and cups. Two staff members with two keys were required to open the door and hand him the metal tray of food.

Doreen's memory of the facility, of the room Cook occupied, was vivid. It was all tiled, she said, with squares of white marbley material and the window in the door was made of Georgian glass, very expensive, but it would break with enough force. He would have had to sit on the floor. The rooms relied on the heat coming in under the door from the hallway. In the winter there'd be frost on the insides of the windows in the rooms. Terrible. Oh those times, she said. When she thought about them now, she was ashamed. The nurses were treated royally; fresh cinnamon buns and butter, and coffee with real cream for their coffee breaks. On a silver tea service no less. She shook her head. The patients got their coffee in plastic cups with sugar and milk already added whether they wanted it or not.

But to get back to Robert Cook, Doreen said, she didn't believe he was guilty. There was no definitive evidence. He requested reading material and writing paper and a pencil, and every single magazine came back with a message written on it: I did not kill my family. He believed that so fervently, she said, that she had to believe it as well. This wasn't a sophisticated criminal. He wasn't that bright. He knew how to steal cars.

We both looked down at the picture of Cook on the front of
The Work of Justice.
Such an ordinary-looking young man. I guess he was never bound for glory, I mused.

Well, no, Doreen answered, but she was certain he deserved a better ending.

Suddenly she asked about my children. How many did I have, and what did they do. I told her about my three, my librarian daughter, conservationist son, and our youngest, an aspiring musician. When I said that he was a drummer, she patted my hand. A good way to get rid of aggression, she said. But what about you, she asked, what is it that's compelling you to spend months—years, I could have corrected—tracking the dead? This was a question I'd been trying to answer, trying to justify the time spent poring over newspaper clippings and gory details with an interest that dumbfounded me. Trying to justify the expense in time and travel and distraction from the other writing that would have come easily, and probably would have yielded far more gratification by now. Memory, I told her, seemed to be the root of it. There were scraps of memory that I was struggling to connect, not necessarily to reach a conclusion of any sort, but to weave them into enough of a story that I could feel a sense of personal resolution. I had become bound to the story as well, I told her, because of the number of people with whom I'd spoken who believed Cook was innocent. Not that I was trying to establish either his guilt or innocence or even come to a conclusion of my own, but that uncertainty left so much room for discovery.

She nodded slowly as though she understood perfectly, and I believe she did. She was sorry her information was slight, and her memories so shaky, she said.

Mine, I told her, because they were childhood memories, were even less reliable.

Oh, but she hoped that I had good childhood memories too. Memories were so important. She and her husband had owned race horses, and when they won her husband would have lobster served for forty or fifty people at the McDonald Hotel in Edmonton, or the Palliser in Calgary. Roses for all the women. When they lost he did the same thing. She had wonderful memories. So important.

Then she suggested I speak with someone else who'd worked at Ponoka and had been on duty the night Cook escaped. She would call Gary Anderson for me and ask his permission to pass along his phone number.

Shirley and I walked out to Doreen's car with her.

Good luck with this, she said. Do a good job for Robert Raymond Cook.

Funny, isn't it that he was always Robert Raymond Cook in the news? Never Bob or Bobby.

She put an arm around me. Oh, I'm sure he was, somewhere, she said. Somebody had to love him, somewhere along the line.

On the way home, Shirley and I talked about the shadowy figure of Robert Raymond Cook, about how there wasn't a single impression I'd gleaned from anyone who'd come in contact with him that suggested the kind of violence that had wiped out the entire Cook family that summer evening. And yet. Weren't sociopaths charming liars? Deceitful? Shallow? Egocentric? Did the fact that Bobby Cook wasn't cunning enough to get away with any of his crimes overrule that possibility? Was the affection he had for his dad real? How could he show remorse, or lack thereof if he truly didn't believe he'd committed the crime? What if he didn't commit the crime? Who did? Was that something I would pursue, Shirley asked, if I became convinced that he was innocent? No. I wasn't interested in detective work of that nature. Then what was this investigation in aid of?

That sure seems to be the question, doesn't it?

It was three months before I was able to talk with Gary Anderson. On a sunny day in February, I picked up a bouquet of tulips on my way out of Calgary, and drove the Queen Elizabeth II Highway once again, this time to Ponoka. I would go on from there to my old hometown of Camrose where I was reading from a new novel that evening. That first book,
Running Toward Home
, is the story of a young boy lost in the child welfare maze. I'd left the story open-ended, to the dismay of some of the readers I'd been hearing from. But what happens next? Is there finally some hope for Corey and the people who care about him? I maintained staunchly that I didn't know. I didn't believe in fairy tale endings, but liked to offer up a bit of redemption. I pondered as I drove, how I'd left Corey's mom and great grandfather on a street corner. How I'd discarded another ending as too maudlin, too unlikely for the characters given their history. How relieved I'd been that I wasn't going to follow them into the next chapter.