The Boy (17 page)

Did she? Louise barely remembers the drive home last night, just the sense of being strung like a wire between the hospital and home, not daring to leave Jake and yet wanting to hold her children close so desperately she felt as though her skin would slide away without them. Tim Horton's? No, not even in a state of confusion would she think it a good idea to bring home donuts. She shakes her head. “I didn't buy donuts.”

“Somebody must have heard about Jake and dropped them off then, so you and the kids could have a sweet snack when you got home.”

Where were they when Jake was stricken? The kitchen, in the midst of preparing Sunday breakfast, Jake frying sausages, a tea towel tucked into his shirt to protect from grease splatters, Louise dipping bread for French toast when the phone rang. “The kitchen must be a disaster,” she says. “We left in the middle of breakfast. Don't you dare clean it up. I'm going to shower and come right down.”

Jon is between them now, rubbing his eyes and snuffling. Phyllis turns him toward the doorway with a gentle smack on the bum. “You go wash your face and hands and you can have a chocolate glazed and a glass of milk.” She closes the bedroom door behind him. “The kitchen is fine, Louise. A bunch of dishes soaking in the sink, but that's all. You must have tidied up when you got home?”

“No.” She did not tidy anything. She did not stop at Tim Horton's. And though a neighbour might have done her the kindness of cleaning her kitchen, they would not leave dishes soaking, nor would any woman in Valmer bring store-bought donuts to a family in crisis. “I left the kitchen in a mess.” And she wrenches open the bedroom door, Phyllis right behind her.

The table is still set except for one plate and fork. In the fridge, there are five cooked sausages, unwrapped on a plate. A bowl full of soggy bread slices. And on the far end of the counter, an empty beer bottle. She picks it up and waves it at Phyllis. “Someone was here while we were gone. Do we have to ask who?” Her hissing anger sends a spray of saliva into the air, and she stops, embarrassed. Phyllis does not need this. Neither does Louise want Jon and Lauren rushing in to find her in another state of emergency.

“I wondered about the beer bottle,” Phyllis says softly. “Thought maybe you needed it after the day you'd had. Come.” She takes Louise's arm and guides her to the table. “Sit down. Have a cup of coffee. Is it such a bad thing if Danny came home? It's just too bad he didn't know why you were away. Maybe he would have stayed.”

One deep breath, then Louise crosses the kitchen to the basement door. She doesn't hesitate at the bottom, kicks open the door to the room he hasn't inhabited in over two years, and exhales. He is not here. But he was. The new clothes Jake took to Bowden six months ago are no longer folded on the bed and the dresser drawers are open. She doesn't need to go upstairs to the desk in the den and slide open the cubbyhole where Jake keeps emergency cash. It's gone. She is as sure of this as she is that Daniel did not come home with any intention of staying.

Jon heard a noise in the night, and she had heard a car pull away in the early hours of morning. Either he was in the house, hiding in the basement room, or standing in the dark kitchen when they came in last night, or he came in while they slept, puttered about in the kitchen, gathered his things, and crept away quickly. Or he might have come and gone earlier, before they returned, the noises just the usual creaking of the house, the car outside of no relevance to this house and family. Louise sweeps all those bits of evidence aside. She will not dwell on them, nor will she tell Jake that Danny came home. For now.

Why the dirty dishes?

Stuck in my mind, I think, from Pecover's chapter on the unproven alibi and clues left dangling. Bobby Cook said he came home on Thursday night, had coffee and sandwiches with his folks, and then left soon afterward. There were coffee cups stacked beside the sink, but no one counted them.

That's a serious omission?

It might for once have validated something he said. Jim and Leona Hoskins had coffee with
Daisy and Ray before Ray went out looking for Bobby. Four cups. If there were only four cups when the police searched the house, then Bobby's story about the welcome home refreshments was probably a lie. If there were five cups, or maybe seven if Ray and Daisy indulged in a clean cup to join him, just a fragment of truth wouldn't have harmed his case.

No matter who drank coffee and ate sandwiches, or how many cups were left for next morning's dishes, the rest of the night is still a black hole.

Not if Bobby's story that he was helping Sonny Wilson break into Cosmo Cleaners in Edmonton at 1:00 AM had been proven.

That was the only thing standing in the way of an innocent verdict? Where did you get that idea.

From Jack Pecover. He told me to re-read Chapter Twenty.

Roads Back

Two years after I'd walked away from the Hillhurst Sunday flea market with Jack Pecover's book in my hand, I had reams of newspaper clippings, audio files of interviews, random notes scribbled after long walks in which thoughts churned and clotted into ideas. I had also applied to and been accepted in the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, something I'd been contemplating for some time. Now I had a purpose beyond earning another degree. If I was to do justice to this piece of history, I needed strong guidance in the area of creative non-fiction. I was convinced, after several aborted starts on the book that I could not separate the story of the Cook murders from the fiction that was growing even faster in my mind. My goal was to write a story that reflected the human side rather than the legal twists and turns and infamy of the Cook case. But the discomfort I felt in delving into the personal lives of people who'd met such a horrible fate was close to stifling me. The first summer residency at UBC liberated me from that sense of privacy invaded. Truth, Terry Glavin, the non-fiction instructor with whom I was to work through another full year course and an independent study, insisted, would validate my intent. And Truth was only attainable, in so far as it is ever pinned down, through fact. Do the research, never depart from the facts, and remain humble in admitting inadequacies. Let the unproven remain unknown, and bring what you can to the page with respect and honesty.

So many people remembered the Cook murders, so many still wondered at the outcome, several had written about it, likely others would as well. There were, I was sure, no answers to the big question of whether Robert Raymond Cook was guilty, and if he wasn't, then who was, and if he was, had his guilt been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, and even if it had was the death penalty warranted? Even less likely that there was an answer to my own quite different question: Who were these people, and how did this horror befall them? Out of my interviews I'd begun to extract almost cinematic images of Father, Mother, well-tended children, modest home, small town life. In my mind, I could see children spilling out the back door of the white bungalow, Daisy Cook at the kitchen counter buttering sandwiches, Ray Cook tinkering in the shadowy garage. I could imagine life in that house, but I could not make myself go beyond 9:00 PM. on the Thursday night of June 25, 1959. While my quest had been to bring life back to the images of Ray and Daisy Cook, Gerry, Patty, Chrissy, Kathy, Linda, I'd found an even clearer image of Robert Raymond Cook emerging—Bobby, the cocky delinquent stepson who stole from the family the benign description of “ordinary folks.”

In the reading and re-reading of Jack Pecover's book, I could get so far as the meeting of father and son on Main Street, Stettler, at around 9:00 PM, conjure the scene around the kitchen table, coffee cups in the hands of the adults, five children circling shyly around the prodigal brother. But from what I'd read and been told about Robert Cook, I could not put the shotgun in his hands or imagine him swinging through the house in the bloody massacre of his small brothers and sisters. I could not put his face to the image of the man heaving bodies into a pit, pouring kitchen garbage over those remains. And I could not see him scrubbing the splattered walls. The jury had been able to imagine exactly that scene, though, and I admitted to myself that if I'd been confronted with all of the evidence and the stumbling, prevaricating Cook in the witness box, I too might have been convinced of the ending.

Took you a while. I knew a few chapters into this that you didn't want Bobby Cook to be guilty. That's why I'm here. You want to change the ending. But I'm leery of where we're headed. Changing the endings doesn't necessarily mean happy endings to you, does it?

Of course not. Ultimately every story has to end sadly, doesn't it?

Only in real life.

Roads Back

Pecover's exhaustive exploration of the Cook murders had become my textbook. He had so thoroughly peeled back the messy layers of the criminal case that even had I been inclined to follow that thread in my own obsession with the Cooks the work was already done. Pecover's wit, the deep irony of the story, made fascinating reading. I had read the chapters titled “The Suspect” and “The Seven” so many times the pages had separated from the spine of the book. I'd begun to wonder what Pecover would think of my unsure feet following the trail he'd laid, and finally picked up the phone one day and called him. The Canada 411 listing did not give an address for Jack Pecover, but from the area code, I'd assumed he lived in Edmonton. An easy destination for me, and family in that area always added another purpose to my trips. Yes, he would be interested in hearing about what I was up to, he said, but he lived near Westlock, another hour and a half's drive north of Edmonton. He went to Edmonton, he said, only when absolutely necessary and two days hence would be such a day.

I arranged to meet Jack Pecover at a bookstore on the far south end of the city, and once again drove through nasty weather, this time a wet day in July with the temperature hovering around five degrees Celsius. Just north of Red Deer, a storm threw down blinding curtains of rain. When I tried to pull over, wait out the worst of it, there were so many cars following close behind I was afraid I would lead several more in the same direction, none of them expecting me to stop. I was sure I would remember the pursuit of this story as fraught with treacherous driving and cold feet.

There are two photos of Jack Pecover in
The Work of Justice
. In one he is standing in a stairwell at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre in front of a door through which twenty-six men and one woman passed on their way to the old gallows in the exercise yard. In 1954, a new Superintendent of Prisons for the province of Alberta, E. E. Buchanan, proposed moving the hangings to an indoor location. Previously, tarpaulins had been slung over windows that gave some of the prisoners a view of the execution site, and people in the community had been known to seek out high
vantage points so that they could watch the show. In the second photo, Jack Pecover crouches on the floor of the room that became the indoor death chamber. The trapdoor in the floor is now filled in with plywood. For six years after it was constructed, the gallows in the room was unused, and after Cook fell through the trapdoor into the autopsy room below—another photo in the book—it was never used again.

I arrived at the bookstore with just enough time to check my tape recorder before I splashed across the parking lot. So far no one had objected to my recording their words. I am a poor note-taker, caught up too easily in conversation, depending on memory. But notes it would have to be with Jack Pecover, because the slick digital device was dead, and not even fresh batteries revived it.

He was easy to spot, a tall slim man in a trench coat, his face familiar from the photos. We sat at a small table crowded into the coffee shop corner of the store, and I found myself babbling nervously about my interest in the Cook case. I did not need to explain my fascination to the man who had written a 449 page book on the trials of Robert Raymond Cook.

Jack Pecover was still in law school when Robert Raymond Cook was executed. He become engrossed in the case, and one day, about a year after Cook's death, he was walking in downtown Edmonton and found himself outside the office of Giffard Main. On a whim, he went up the stairs, asked to speak with the famous lawyer and to his surprise was escorted into Main's office. He wanted to write a book about the Cook case, he told Main, and to his even greater surprise, the man agreed—on the condition that he, Giffard Main, would write the first and last chapters of the book. Jack Pecover said that at that point, he would have agreed to any condition to be given Main's blessing. Main helped carry the files related to the case down to the car, and Pecover drove away with the pieces of a story that would take almost twenty years to emerge as a book, and even then would remain an unfinished puzzle.

Over the course of several years, Jack Pecover saw Gifford Main a number of times, but said Main never berated him for his slow progress on the book. Before it was completed, Main died, and the ending was left to the author.

I had read
The Work of Justice
so many times, and it is such a complete compendium of the facts related to the Cook case, that I found myself with few specific questions for Jack Pecover. I found myself, too, feeling nervous, a little awkward throughout our conversation, and later I would discover that the notes I made were sketchy, and felt as though they had been directed by Mr. Pecover himself.

Mainly, I wanted to hear about his experience, about the years spent poring over records, talking with more than two hundred people, and about the image of Robert Raymond Cook that must surely have become a presence by the time he reached his conclusions. I was curious, too, about his conclusions, despite the disclaimer in the introduction to the book:

My purpose is not to second-guess the jurors, they concluded what they did based on the evidence they heard. Nor is it to criticize those who investigated or those who tried the case – although some such criticism, occasionally severe, will be found here. Rather, it is simply to present the complexities of the case, allowing readers an outsider's view of how and why a man was sent to death by his community. Readers will be left to decide for themselves whether his guilt was clearly established. (
The Work of Justice
pg. xxiv)

Jack Pecover may have left it to the reader to decide if Cook was guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, but it was clear that he himself had considerable doubt. And he made it clear almost as soon as we sat down with our coffee that he believed Robert Raymond Cook was innocent. So sure, that he and a journalist who had written one of the other books I had used in my research—Alan Hustak, author of
They were Hanged
—had seriously discussed pursuing a posthumous pardon for Cook. Why, I asked was he so sure? Chapter twenty-one, he said. Read chapter twenty-one again.

Chapter twenty-one is titled “The Second Newspaper.” In it, Pecover does an analysis of the possible whereabouts of the copy of the Friday, June 26, 1959
Calgary Herald
that was delivered to the front porch of the Cook residence at around 6:30 P.M. on that date, so the paperboy told Dave MacNaughton. So, too, was the Saturday, June 27, 1959
Calgary Herald
delivered, but when the house was searched on Sunday, June 28, only the Saturday paper was on the floor where the paperboy had dropped it. Among the items listed as found in the grease pit in the garage with the bodies, were “three newspapers,” only one of them identified as the issue of Wednesday, June 25. If one of the blood-soaked papers was Friday's, then the bodies—or at least the five bodies in the layers above those papers—were not placed in the pit until sometime after 6:00 P.M. on Friday. If the Friday paper was not among those in the pit, then someone removed it from the house between Friday at 6:30 P.M. and Sunday morning. Cook's whereabouts had been documented by the prosecution, almost to the hour from the time he arrived at the car dealership in Edmonton at about 8:00 AM Friday morning until he returned home to Stettler on Saturday evening. If it was he who removed the Friday paper from the house, he either took it with him on his joy-ride down Main Street after his quick stop at the house on Saturday but the paper was not found in his possession, or it was in that one hour that he pulled the Friday paper from beneath the Saturday issue, threw it into the pit, hauled the bodies out to the garage and scrubbed down the premises. Jack Pecover's view of the likelihood of that possibility:

The clean-up alone invites awe. Seven maids with seven mops couldn't have accomplished in half a year what Cook carried off, along with everything else, in a little hour by way covering his tracks to seven bodies. (
The Work of Justice
pg. 359)

On a copy of the preliminary inquiry transcript, there is a note by Dave MacNaughton: “Where was Friday's paper?” and further notes, and there is a memorandum prepared by MacNaughton to question the milkman as to whether he saw the Friday paper when he went into the porch on Saturday around noon, found no bottles, and concluded that the family was away. The question was not asked in the first trial, and by the second, the milkman had died. The paperboy told MacNaughton that he did not see the Friday paper when he delivered Saturday's, but he was not called as a witness.

Chapter Twenty-one talks as well about the discrepancies in the description of several other pieces of evidence:

The salient characteristic of a good part of the physical evidence which played a part in the Cook trials was its ability to materialize or vanish at will as if some psychic dimension enconjured from the intoxicating philosophy of the New Age hovered over the case extruding some things and swallowing others.
(
The Work of Justice
pg. 351)

Then who had murdered those seven people? Did he have a theory? Of course. But he would not be following that trail any further. And neither, I decided as I listened, would I. The one thing I knew for sure from the months of digging through information about the Cook family murders, was that I was no investigative journalist. Over and over again, I realized that I was leaving fragments of information behind. By the time I met Jack Pecover, I was desperate to be finished with the story, to return to fiction.

Ha! You think you're desperate? Was it really necessary to drag me along this bloody trail?
Yes.

That's the one thing I know for sure.

Jack Pecover turned over every pebble he could find on the twisted path that led Robert Raymond Cook to the gallows, and in the process, he said, he felt he'd come to know young Cook very well indeed. He'd visited the Cook family grave in the Hanna cemetery, and the room where Robert Cook was hanged at the Fort Saskatchewan Gaol. He'd spoken with the two Lutheran ministers who, at the request of Lila Larson, Cook's foster sister, had given him spiritual counsel in the last month and attended his execution. In his epilogue, Pecover says:

I have purposefully omitted a discussion of Cook's religious conversion being unqualified to offer any opinion—assuming one is called for—on its genuineness. As a non-believer, I saw myself as running the risk of dismissing it as a foxhole conversion without having the credentials to pronounce on it in any way. Being unqualified to have an opinion however rarely operates as a bar to having one, and mine is that it was genuine. If a man's last words are a call for forgiveness of those who have trespassed against him, as much as one can do is grant him the moment and stand back in silent and contemplative respect. (
The Work of Justice
pg. 435)

Unlike all of the other people I had interviewed who had begun by saying it was so long ago, it seemed to me that for Jack Pecover, the Cook case had not receded into any past. Cook was long dead, but the questions that the courtroom had failed to even ask remained unanswered. As for the book, he said there were chapters he would like to rewrite.

We talked, at the end of our conversation, about the political implications of Cook's death sentence and the subsequent efforts of his lawyers and Lila Larson to have his sentence commuted. The timing, however, was terminally bad for Cook.

Jack Pecover asked if any of my work was on the shelves of this bookstore we sat in. It was not, but I had a copy of my first novel in the car and gave it to him in meager exchange for the book that had given me the strong bones of the Cook story. I found myself, as I drove back to Calgary that day, feeling the weariness that I had sensed in Jack Pecover. I, too, wanted to be done.

Two weeks later, I had a letter from Pecover. He had read my novel and said that he believed Cook had now “fallen into good and eminently competent hands, which I welcome. He did not deserve the fate he received at our hands, and his shades now deserve the perceptiveness you'll bring to them.” That confidence felt misplaced. I feared that I would end with even more questions than Pecover. I would have to rely on fiction, on Louise.

I am not reliable. And I am not a credible stand-in for Daisy. Everything you've found about Daisy makes her out to be the good step-mother. She never stopped trying. Doesn't Pecover mention that the prison incoming mail records are full of “Mrs. Ray Cook”? And those yellow socks and the red tie that she sent for his release. Surely she had a smile on her face when she chose those.

Is that what you imagine?

Ah, that's right. You want me to do the hard part for you. Yes, I can imagine Daisy sending packages to prison. To a boy, who's turned into a man in a place that is beyond her imagining.

Daisy takes the cardboard backing out of the shirt to fold it in two, slide it into the cracker box—Ritz—the only small box she can find. She rolls the socks into a yellow ball, wraps tissue paper around the tie. Still there's room to spare. What else? Five cent pack of Kleenex, Juicy Fruit gum. Bar of soap? Are they allowed to use their own soap? She doesn't want to think about this, about where men shower. The steam, wet bodies slick with hair. Thick arms reaching for the soap, armpits dripping. Is the water hot or do they shiver in lukewarm? Are the towels thin and grey? Does he pull on the same sweat-stained shorts and undershirt, or clean clothes every day? No. Not every day. What is there to dirty outer garments in those locked rooms?