The Boy (15 page)

The problem with the Cook story was that the people in it were real. The ending was written, and there was no redemption.

So, that's the purpose of my story. Epiphany! We must be on the road to Damascus!

No, we are on the road to Red Deer, far from any epiphany. Go back to sleep and let me concentrate on the scenery.

During the writing of
Running Toward Home,
I had spent hours, days, months hanging out at the Calgary zoo where the story was primarily set. Now, this central Alberta landscape I was driving through had taken on a new persona in the months that the Cook murders occupied my thoughts and my writing. These were roads that Robert Raymond Cook drove in June, 1959. If his explanation of his hours between his release and his return home to Stettler were true, then he drove this same highway to recover the loot he gave to his dad. It was the $4100 he gave to his father that set in motion the sudden trip to British Columbia to look for a service station, the father and son opportunity they'd both spoken of. Robert had said that after taking the midnight bus from Saskatoon, he and his pal, Jimmy Myhaluk, arrived
in Edmonton at 7 A.M. on Wednesday, June 24. Myhaluk went to his parents' home, and Cook checked into the Commercial Hotel. He washed up, had breakfast, and then made the first of his three trips to Hood Motors where he found the Impala convertible, the object of another of his dreams. He told the salesman he was a mechanic, in business with his father. He said he'd return with a car for trade-in on Friday. Then, according to a story that stayed constant through the trials, and in a document he called “Murder by Infernce” that he wrote while he awaited his execution, he walked south on 104
th
Street until he came to a used car dealership on the outskirts of the city. He hot-wired a car, drove away undetected and headed south for Bowden. There, he dug up a tobacco tin he said he'd buried in April 1957, the loot from the string of break-ins for which he had just served his time. With $4300 in his pocket, he drove back to Edmonton, returned the car to the lot and went off to find Myhaluk or any other of his cohorts for a night of partying before his return home the next day. This was the same Bowden landscape Dave MacNaughton had scoured with Cook's directions, trying to corroborate the story, but ending up in a graveyard instead. No one, it appears—from Pecover's book which looks at the “Bowden caper” in detail, and from the court transcripts—attempted to pin down the car lot and establish the probability of Cook stealing and returning a car in broad daylight. His own explanation from his testimony in the first trial when he was asked why he didn't just abandon the car:

It is much better to leave it where I took it from and then it isn't reported stolen and the guy doesn't miss it. Nobody is hurt and nobody knows different. (
The Work of Justice
pg. 195)

Nobody hurt, by Cook's assessment, in any of the crimes he committed. And a theft that would seem all in a day's work to Robert Raymond Cook who'd been stealing cars since he could peer over a steering wheel. After he broke out of Ponoka, Robert Cook hot-wired a car and drove these same roads. As I passed the hamlet of Morningside, looking for a sign that said Spruce Road that would signal the turn
to Gary Anderson's acreage, I was only about ten kilometers away from the Ponoka mental hospital. I imagined this countryside in July, 1959, swarming with police cars and army. I imagined Robert Raymond Cook, the “gentle little fellow” Doreen Scott had described—or was he the killer with “the coldest eyes ever seen” as a
Red Deer Advocate
reporter described? He said one look at Cook had chilled him “to the bone.”

The offering of tulips was a good impulse. Gary Anderson and his wife were gardeners. We sat in the sunroom of their acreage home and looked out at the large garden, stalks of
last year's perennials poking through the snow. After working as a psychiatric nurse at the Ponoka hospital, Gary had gone on to university to take a degree in Education, then a Masters degree in Psychology. He was now retired.

Since my phone call, he had been looking for information on the Cook case on the internet. He said his memory of the case was sketchy, and it had been a long time since he'd even thought about Robert Raymond Cook.

Gary Anderson was nineteen years old when he started work at the mental hospital in April, 1959. That fall, he would start a three year course in psychiatric nursing. It was a practical arrangement; a decent wage while he earned this credential.

On June 30, 1959, Robert Raymond Cook was admitted to Male 6, the admission ward at Ponoka, and a few days later, Gary had his one and only contact with Cook. Disturbed patients or dangerous patients, Gary told me, were held in “side rooms” on the admissions ward. They had their meals in their rooms, while the other patients ate in a common dining room. Gary and some of his fellow staff members wondered why Cook had been sent to Ponoka and not to Alberta Hospital in Edmonton where most of the forensic cases were confined and assessed. Ponoka did have a unit for the “criminally insane” who he said it seemed to him were often there for “years and years” without review.

There were always three staff members on duty on the admissions ward, usually one psychiatric nurse and two attendants. Gary remembered Robert Cook as looking very much like the newspaper photos; sandy-haired, clean cut, probably no more than five foot six, and not particularly muscular, but “agile-looking.” On the day of their one contact, Cook had asked to use the washroom and Gary and another staff member escorted Cook from his room to a toilet across the hall. The staff members, Gary said, were understandably wary. Here was someone who was believed to have savagely murdered seven people. Yet here he was, pyjama-clad, quiet, polite when he did speak. There was no door on the washroom, so he was led there and back under close watch.

On the night of July 10, Gary was again on duty on the admissions ward, this time on the night shift. Staff who lived in residence at Ponoka took their meals there, and supper for the night shift was at 11:30. Gary was “second junior on the totem pole” that night. After the 11:30 room check, the senior staff member passed the “check key” for the side rooms to Gary and left to have supper in the staff dining room. The most junior member, a university student working there for the summer, was in another corridor, checking dormitory rooms.

At midnight, Gary peered through the observation window in the door to Cook's room. He had a flashlight, but said he didn't need it tell that the room was empty. The green night light illuminated the small room well enough to show him that the inside mesh screen from the window was on the floor amidst splinters of glass from the outside pane. He tried to peer down to the base of the door and along the wall to ensure that Cook wasn't crouched there, waiting, but could see nothing. In retrospect, he says, he knows he should have called another staff member but he was immediately struck with the huge significance of the empty room. He said he had to confirm that Cook was really gone before he sounded the alarm, so he opened the door and went inside. The screen, which required a wrench to undo the deadbolt that kept it in place, had been removed and the window punched out. There was blood on the shards of glass remaining in the frame. In mental hospital vernacular, Robert Raymond Cook had “eloped.”

The opening through which Cook had wriggled was eight inches by eleven inches, slightly smaller than a sheet of letter paper. When the RCMP tried to re-enact the escape, their officer became wedged in the opening with his head and one arm outside the window, unable to move either forward or backward. He had to be pulled back into the room by his colleagues.

How could Cook have managed this escape on his own? Gary hesitated before he answered. There was a fire escape outside the window, he said, and it would not have been difficult for someone to come up those outside stairs, break the glass, and hand through a wrench or some other tool for liberating the screen. Cook could not, Gary was sure, have drawn back the bolt that held the screen with his bare hands. Not even with the rush of adrenaline that must have propelled him through the glass-barbed window. There had been a lot of speculation among the staff as to whether or not the assistance, if there was any, had come from the inside. While Doreen Scott had mentioned a staff member, Gary said there was also a patient in the discharge unit who was very close to release, a man who may have felt sympathy for Cook, and could certainly have found his way to that window because he had the run of the hospital grounds in the last stages of his stay. Perhaps he'd talked through the window with Cook, and planned what was necessary to remove the screen, then come back with the tool in hand. The patients knew the schedule of nighttime rounds and between the time Gary and the departing day staff made the shift-change check of the room at 11:30, and Gary's return just after midnight there was time.

With the full alarm sounded, the manhunt was on, but even after Cook's capture, the question of how he got away was never answered. Cook told Dave MacNaughton he'd given the police the story they wanted—he had help—but that he'd really broken out on his own, and forty-five years later, none of this, Gary and I agreed, was more than an interesting riddle. What remained was the fact that even before the trial, there were some among the staff at Ponoka who were convinced that Cook was not guilty. It seemed extraordinarily unlikely, though, that anyone would have been sympathetic enough to have helped him escape.

Dave MacNaughton had spoken to a psychiatrist at Ponoka the day before Cook eloped and was told that the assessment would not be complete for several days. After the escape, though, a report was provided saying that Cook showed no psychotic signs and was fit to stand trial. Ponoka was done with him. Looking back, Gary Anderson said, Cook's actions after the murders, his joy-riding and the return to Stettler, were exactly the sorts of irrational actions that would point to illness. So, too, was Cook's rationale for his escape—his wish to attend a funeral that was already over. Or maybe the confinement at Ponoka pushed him over the edge. He is quoted in a report by one of the psychiatrists, Dr. Edwards, as saying, “If I'm not crazy now, I will be by the time the 30 days are up.”

I went on to Camrose after talking with Gary Anderson, and that night met several old schoolmates at the reading. Over drinks afterward, someone asked what story I was working on now. I hesitated, always reluctant to talk about a project too early, and in this case so unsure of my motives for pursuing the story that I felt a little foolish. The mention of Robert Raymond Cook brought a chorus of “I remember that!” Stettler is close enough to Camrose that several people had older brothers and sisters who'd either met Cook, or
knew someone who knew someone who had. There was dissent over his guilt, which I'd come to expect, the invoking of the rumour of the uncle's death bed confession, and finally the childhood memories we all seemed to have of adults whispering about the pit full of bodies and the rampant fear after Cook's escape. It was a hot summer, someone said. The hottest one she remembered.

You think he was innocent! You've become sympathetic!

I don't know if he was innocent or guilty. But yes, I'm becoming sympathetic. Too many holes in the story. Questions that were never answered.

Oh so now this story is about the son, is it? What about the family? What about Daisy?

Yes, Daisy. Let's go back to Daisy. And you.

The Boy

Louise and Jake have been circling around the topic of Daniel's homecoming like a couple of cats stalking the same bird. He's served fourteen months of the two year sentence and is due to be released in another month. No one wants to ask, “What next?” Until Jon comes home from school in such a deep pout his lower lip stretches almost to his nose.

He throws his backpack across the kitchen floor, a burst of aggression so unlike him and yet becoming so much more frequent that Louise's throat tightens.

She sits him down at the kitchen table with a plate of cheese and crackers, then pulls a chair close to his and puts her arm around him while he munches. “What's up? Bad day?”

He looks down at the plate, traces a trail in the cracker crumbs with his finger. Looks up at her with pleading eyes. “Can you come to school tomorrow and tell the kids Danny's not a jailbird. Mommy, what's a jailbird?”

Ignorant parents! And what about the teacher? “Does Mrs. Ferguson know the kids are teasing you?”

He nods. “She said I have to talk to you and you should come see her. She said it means Danny's in jail.”

Which Jon has known for months now. They dropped the pretence of “school” when Daniel graduated to Bowden. “Did she say Danny's trouble with the police has nothing to do with you?” By now both Jon and Lauren know that when a policeman comes to the door it's because of Dan. Even with Dan locked away, the police keep coming. Did he ever hang out with this one? Known to associate with that one? Do they know where he was on the night of some date two years ago?

“When does Danny get to come home?”

Louise has a blinding flash of memory, of Jon on Danny's back. Go, horsey! Yo, bro, it's time for a skateboard! Wow, did this guy ever grow!

Jake is barely through the door two hours later, when she takes his arm, pulls him into the bedroom and closes the door.

“So what's the story on Danny? Is he coming here, or what? Every time I've asked you just shrug and say they haven't worked out his plans yet. Jon just told me the kids are ragging him about having a criminal for a brother. He wants to know when Danny's coming home. What do I tell him?”

Jake pulls the sheer curtains aside and braces his arms on the window sill. Not much to see out there, just the wall of Henry Schultz's garage, the corner charred from the fire. Maybe, Louise hopes, that reminder will inform Jake's decision. She presses on. “You must have talked about this the last time you went up there. What does he want?”

Jake gathers a handful of curtain and holds it away from the window, contemplating as though he's redecorating rather than facing a family crisis. “I don't know, Lou.” He sighs and finally turns, shoulders sloped, his arms at his sides as though there are impossible weights tied to his wrists. “You can probably stop worrying, because he doesn't want to come home. He says there's nothing here for him.” He looks at her thoughtfully. Trying to imagine her through Danny's eyes? She gave up that game long ago, how to be the good stepmother. “He says he's nervous around you. Always sure he's going to make a wrong move. And then he always does.”

“Like what? Asking him to take his shoes off when he comes inside makes him nervous? Put the lid down on the toilet after he uses it?” She tries to keep the whiny tone out of her voice but it's impossible. Lately it isn't her image through Danny's eyes that troubles her, but how Jake must see her. What would Brenda have done these past eight years? Jake must ask himself that question as well.

“I'll go talk to Jon about the gossip the kids are spreading,” Jake says. “What about Lauren? She upset too?”

“Jake, it's not gossip. Everybody knows where he is. We can't make it out to be the fault of the kids. That's what kids do. Lauren's okay, I think. She's way better at telling them to get lost and she's the queen bee of grade one so the other kids want to be in her good books. It's Jon who's wounded every time.” Jon, she doesn't say, who keeps trying to defend his brother.

Jake opens the bedroom door, words coming back to her over his shoulder. “Then it's time he toughened up a little,” he says. “Don't worry. I'm not going to tell him to duke it out. My pacifist upbringing is still too strong for that.”

What he does instead of talk, is to take both Jon and Lauren to the coffee shop for milkshakes, treat a couple of their friends as well, and make sure he tells everyone in the place that Dan is getting out soon, and he and Louise are optimistic. The boy has surely learned his lesson and it can only get better from here on in. Jon comes home with a smile on his face, swinging hands with his dad on the way up the front walk.

That night, spooned into the curl of her husband's warm body, Louise keeps hearing the replay of the words he whispered before he fell asleep. “We have beautiful kids, Lou. So beautiful.”

She lies there, trying to feel reassured, feel everything right in her small world, and yet that cold hand clutching her stomach will not ease off. She shifts slightly, then widens the gap between them and finally slides away from Jake and out of bed.

After Jake stormed at her to get rid of Brenda's Cook murder files, she stashed them in the laundry room in the basement in a box filled with quilt squares that belonged to her predecessor. Not that she had any intention of stitching together Brenda's abandoned project, but the neat piles of colour and texture-coded squares seemed too precious to be thrown away.

The concrete floor is like chipped ice on her bare feet. She pulls a pair of Jake's socks out of the dryer along with the sweatshirt he wore around the house on Sundays. When she's warm again, and the creaking of the basement steps and all the other sounds of the old house that she stirred when she made her way down the stairs have settled into silence, she opens the scrapbook to a clipping from the
Red Deer Advocate
, July 3, 1996, the Cook case brought to light again because of the publication of Jack Pecover's book.

Under the headline, “Did He Do It?” the newspaper article includes a collage of faded photos: Robert Raymond Cook's RCMP mugshot; a snap of the five Cook children squinting into the sun; a formal portrait of a bespectacled Daisy looking every cell the school marm; the white frame bungalow with the truck parked next to the garage; and finally a crowd in the street in Bashaw waiting for a glimpse of Robert Cook after his capture following the Ponoka escape. Louise holds the photos close and looks hard into Daisy's eyes. A serious face, but is she only imagining fear? She can't bear to look into the children's faces. She closes her eyes, leans her head against a garment bag of winter coats hanging on the wall and wills that scrapbook out of her hands, into the trash barrel, incinerated somewhere far away. Daniel Peters is Jake's son, a boy she's known since he was twelve years old, the brother of her own children. He is not Robert Raymond Cook. She is not Daisy Cook. There is no connection here. None.

Is that clear enough? Can we burn those clippings now? Donate the books to the next used book sale? I'm sure someone out there will find them morbidly fascinating. Can you tell I'm tired of this and I have a bad feeling about the way it's going?

I'm not sure why. I know now how your story will end. You are not Daisy. But do we dare to imagine Daisy's ending?

That's the problem, isn't it. Neither of us wants to go there?

You mean into the white bungalow on the night of Thursday, June 25, 1959?

Exactly. Why don't you just write that story and cut mine loose?

Because no one knows what happened?

You're a writer. Make it up.

I've tried. I can't, because I don't know the truth. And anything less dishonors these people.

But we can imagine it, to a point, can't we.

Not me. Not even to a point. But I can give it to you.

All right then. This is how I've dreamed it.

Daisy, splashed by a blood-red setting sun, leans into the window. The air in the kitchen is soupy, not even the sigh of a breeze.

She lifts a corner of waxed paper covering the plate of sandwiches, pokes at a crust of bread. Mustard has dried marigold yellow on a protruding grey bologna tongue. She re-wraps, and presses the plate to the counter. Too late for the fridge? Lock the barn door when the horse is dead?

“Mommy?”

Kathy, cheeks flushed, kitty-cat pyjamas twisted, droops in the doorway between kitchen and bedrooms. Then Linda toddles to her sister's side, blanket trailing, thumb corked between her lips. Daisy huffs the fringe of hair off her forehead. “Back to bed, babies!”

“Thirsty!” Kathy's toes click on the linoleum. From the living room, the voices of her brothers are muzzled by the heat. “Bobby here?” she asks.

“Not yet.” Daisy scoops one pudgy girl onto each bare arm. She waltzes slow around the kitchen, sets the fly paper spinning. Then swoops over the grey arborite table. Linda's diaper snags on the chrome edge. Daisy lifts, then bops her around the table, one damp print at each place. Deposits her finally on Daddy's spot. Shifts Kathy to sit beside her baby sister. Lifting the corners of her apron, she fans a breeze for two flushed, up-turned faces. Reminds herself to take off the tatty apron. Berates herself that she cares. Touches her hair, self-consciously. Relives the plucking of a coarse strand of white from the red this morning. And feels that sting all over again.

From the living room, the opening music to 77 Sunset
Strip snaps its fingers. Daisy winks at Kathy. “Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb!” she sings, tickles her fingers through the little girl's hair. “Turn it down!” she calls to the boys. “Your dad will be here any minute.” Ray can't stand the show. Kookie too much like Bobby, she thinks. So why isn't Kookie in jail? And where is Ray? Where is Bobby, now that he's been sprung?

Then loud voices in the garage, sharp as the edge of a shovel, the scuff of feet, the hard bark of a laugh, scrape of the door as it opens into the kitchen. Ray and Bobby, husband and stepson, drag the smell of grease and garbage into Daisy's kitchen. She encircles the little girls, and calls the boys from the living room.

How am I doing? Is that you how you imagine it?

Yes. Almost exactly. And then …?

I can't go any farther.

And neither can I.

Oh, I know that. You're having even more of a problem going there than I am.