The Boy (7 page)

After Dan's griping, Jake agrees that the boy is old enough to stay home alone. He'll try to get away from work early.

By the time the innocent little party games have been played, the gifts opened, the spread of sandwiches, pickles, dainty sweets set out with coffee which Louise is sure will keep both her and the baby awake well into the early morning, her face aches from smiling. Fortunately, the woman she's ridden with is anxious to leave. She stands at the window fretting. “It's raining dogs and cats,” she says, “and I left clothes out on the line.”

“You're brave.” One of the other women pauses from collecting cups and carrying them to the sink. “I don't hang anything out anymore unless I'm right there with the broom handy.” She turns to Phyllis. “We've got a laundry snitcher in town. All sorts of unmentionables disappearing into thin air. Gives me the willies.”

“Kids,” Phyllis says. “I'll bet you anything it's just kids.” She laughs. “Quit buying fancy underwear and they'll leave you alone. How about you, Louise? You had anything go missing?”

Louise shakes her head. Why admit that it hadn't occurred to her to hang clothes out to dry? Or that it's unlikely anyone would have a prurient interest in her nursing bras or elastic-sprung cotton briefs. Although looking around the room, she doubts that any of these women are hiding Victoria's Secrets.

After the haul of baby gifts has been loaded into the car, they are barely into the car when the woman begins ranting again about clothesline raids. Louise tries to come up with rational possibilities that don't involve perverted motives. She tries too, to avoid sounding like she's fabricating a defense, but unease is growing in the soft pit of her belly, something dark filling the space so recently occupied by her son.

The house is dark. No Danny. No Jake. Gifts safely deposited in the front hallway, her chauffeur's headlights disappearing down the street, Louise stands alone in the silent house with the baby in her arms. On her way to the kitchen she flicks on every light switch she passes. There's a note from Jake on the table. They've gone into the city to a movie. Back around midnight. It's just ten thirty.

Louise changes the baby, nurses him again, reflects on his angelic behaviour at the shower, then settles him into the bassinette beside the bed and crosses the hall to Dan's room. She opens the door slowly, surprised as always by the bareness of the space. The weekend they moved into the house, Jake took Danny shopping for something to brighten the walls but the hockey posters are still in their tubes on his desk. The bookcase is empty, boxes stacked unopened in his closet. The bed is made, albeit a bit haphazardly with the quilt simply pulled up over the pillows, one corner dragging on the floor. Feeling guilty, intrusive, but determined to prove herself wrong, she methodically opens and closes drawers, pages her way through the shirts and sweaters hanging in his closet. She folds a pile of clean clothes that she handed Dan from the dryer earlier and leaves them in a tidy pile on the end of the bed, a sign that she's been in his room. He deserves to know this. Tomorrow she'll ask him if he noticed, if he minds. An opening to the discussion on privacy and mutual respect she's been avoiding. Louise knows that Daniel snoops in their bedroom when he's alone in the house. This is a discussion she won't delegate to Jake. She wants a contract from Daniel. But she's suspicious of her own motives; is she setting him up with a promise she knows he'll breach?

Before she leaves the room she straightens the quilt on the sad-looking bed. When she fluffs the pillows, her hand grazes a bit of cool fabric protruding from beneath. The nightgown under the pillow is satin, a watery lilac shade. Not sexy lingerie, but the expensive indulgence more likely of a woman in her forties than a young girl. The sort of gown that a husband might wrap for Christmas. That any wife in this town would be pleased to own.

She buries the gown under the pillow, and tugs the quilt awry before she leaves the room.

When Jake tiptoes into the bedroom just after midnight, Louise feigns sleep. This can wait until morning.

In fact, she waits until after breakfast, when Danny has ridden off on his bike and Jake has finished his third cup of coffee.

“I need to show you something,” she says. “But first I need to tell you about this problem around town. Someone's stealing underwear off clotheslines.”

He blinks at her, a smile tugging at his tired face. And then he throws his head back and laughs out loud. “That's not news. Louise, every town with clotheslines has a resident pervert who collects panties. So don't hang yours out to dry. You'd think everyone would have figured that out by now.” When he picks up the folded newspaper, she taps him on the shoulder.

“Come with me,” she says. Without another word, she leads the way into Dan's room, relieved that the evidence is still there but also sick inside when she lifts the pillow. Jake looks down at the garment, draws two long breaths before he gathers the wrinkled silk with his fingers.

“It's his mother's,” he says. “This was Brenda's.” He is good enough to keep his eyes on the nightgown while she composes herself.

“Oh,” she says, “oh, I'm sorry, Jake.”

She waits for him to reach for her. He doesn't. Brenda may as well be standing between them.

“How would you know, Lou? I wonder when he salvaged it. A couple of Brenda's friends came over and cleaned out the closet for me because I didn't have the guts to do it myself.” He crumples the nightgown in his fist and returns it as they found it before he steers her out of the room.

“I shouldn't have snooped,” she says, “but when I heard about that clothesline thing at the shower I had this horrible feeling. I had to know.”

“Forget it. I've snooped through his stuff too. It's the only way I know to make sure he's staying out of trouble. But for God's sake, Lou, stopping thinking the worst. The kid is miserable. I took him back into town for a movie last night because he said this place is driving him crazy. Nothing to do, no friends.”

Would there be a point to reminding him that Danny didn't have any friends to speak of before they moved?

“He's at a tough age for a big move like this,” Jakes says.

Originally her argument, but Jake seems to have forgotten that. She shrugs, not willing to sympathize. They moved. It's too late.

“Maybe I'll take him out for a drive to Phyllis and Paul's this afternoon if they're home. Doesn't hurt to remind him he's got a family that cares about him.”

Danny will refuse, but it hurts Louise that Jake thinks he needs to go to Phyllis to find family. And it troubles her even more that while there is an explanation for the nightgown—an explanation so sad she felt limp with despair for the boy when she looked at the pillow after Jake gently returned it to its place—she cannot let go of the possibility that Dan is the clothesline thief. All those hours riding his bike, cruising town. Alone.

Should I have made a big deal of this? Sneaking around clotheslines stealing underwear is a few rungs down, and not even on the same ladder as crashing through road blocks in a stolen car.

Who says for sure he stole the lingerie? Or that he's going to stick with small stuff.

Not me. I'm only the stepmother, remember. What do I know of what goes on in the mind of a teenage boy?

Plenty.

Roads Back

September, 2006

Stefan, my eighteen-year-old son, wandered into my office to ask me a question, and idly picked up a book from my desk.
Sole Survivor, Children Who Murder Their Families.

Was this a good book? he asked. No, I said, it was an ugly book. Then why was I reading it? When I shrugged, he floated calmly on to ask when I would be finished with this project because there was seriously nothing to eat in the house. He turned the book over in his hands and skimmed the synopses of the case studies on the back. Could he borrow it?

When I was done with it, I told him. But I knew I would never put it in his hands. The thought of my own boy reading about other boys, other girls, killing their parents was more than I could handle.

I was mired down in the huge question of how such monstrous affairs unfold. What are the warning signs? Or is there no prevention, just the heavy hand of fate. Was it a trajectory that led to Robert Raymond Cook's homicidal rampage, or one unfortunate incident that pushed him over the edge?

I was back to obsessing over what went on in the little house on 52
nd
Street in Stettler. Who would remember? There were the Hoskinses, who, according to Pecover's book, had visited with Ray and Daisy before Robert came home on that night in June. Family friends, they'd planned a picnic together for the Sunday, and waited, puzzled, when the Cooks didn't appear or answer their phone.

I checked directories, and sent letters to two people named Hoskins in Stettler. Four days later a man called. Right family, he said, but wrong man. It was his dad I should speak to. His mom and dad lived in Red Deer now, not Stettler. His grandparents, Jim and Leona Hoskins, were the folks who were friends with Ray and Daisy Cook. His dad, Clark Hoskins, knew the murdered kids. And by chance, his dad was home for the next two weeks. Then he'd be heading back to Yemen. He worked in and out of the Middle East in the oil patch.

A long way from Stettler to Yemen. Alberta's small towns are shrinking, young people moving away, to the cities, to surprising corners of the world. And yet here was Clark Hoskins' son on the phone from Stettler. And the Cook children? They went only as far as the cemetery in Hanna. Maybe Clark Hoskins could give me a sense of where they might have gone.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Go to Red Deer and ask Clark Hoskins who they were, those five little kids and their parents. And Daisy! Ask him about Daisy, and don't take “ordinary people” for an answer.

They couldn't have been ordinary people. Not with that other son locked away, but always expected to return.

The killer. Too bad no one saw that coming. Or maybe they did.

Or maybe he wasn't the killer.

Are you expecting Hoskins to give you some clue about that?

When I phoned, he said I'd better know up front that he believes in capital punishment. And that Bobby Cook got what he deserved.

Apart from that newspaper series that so coincidentally showed up in Brenda's papers, everything points that way. How about we just accept that, and you get on with the story.

Ah, but that's problem—now that your story and Daisy's are getting tangled, it matters a whole lot more.

Roads Back

The soft-spoken man sitting across from me was nine years old the summer of the Cook murders. It was such a long time ago, he said. Mostly he didn't think about it much anymore. But every now and again, he'd feel compelled to pick up the book and look at the pictures. He jabbed a finger at the cover of
The Work of Justice, The Trials of Robert Raymond Cook
. His copy looked as worn as my own which was also on the table, a-bristle with post-it notes. His dad, he told me, had talked with Jack Pecover, but had refused interviews with other people who were interested in the case. He'd hated the thought of someone making money from the story.

I'd looked at those pictures many times in the past year, trying to imagine beyond them. As a young boy, Clark Hoskins had spent hours in the small house with the vine-covered verandah, may have ridden in the Chevrolet half-ton truck with the green body and white roof parked parallel to the house, in front of the garage. He likely sat at the grey arborite table in the kitchen, shared a lunch of chicken noodle soup or bologna sandwiches. Curly-haired Gerry Cook, squinting into the sun in the photograph of the five Cook children, was Clark Hoskins' childhood friend.

On the drive from Calgary, I'd been wrestling once again with my motivation for bothering this man, with my obsession with the Cook family and their demise. Every time I took off on a new tangent, I went through the same self-searching. What did I want from this? I was hoping that if I wrote about the crime, I might make sense of a young man raging through a home on a summer night and leaving
his father, stepmother, and five young children dead and battered beyond recognition. Sitting there with Clark Hoskins, it seemed an affront to decency to suggest that there was any sense to such an act.

Clark, though, had seemed interested and hospitable since he greeted me at the door. He'd put the coffee on and it burbled away behind us in the sparkling kitchen. I couldn't help thinking of the contrast between this home and the humble house in the photos.

Outside, the fog that had almost kept me home earlier in the morning had begun to lift, and there was a promise of sunshine for the drive back. I'd considered going on to Stettler after talking to Clark. I'd been gathering names, scribbling them in my notebook. An astonishing number of people I knew seemed to have connections in Stettler; an elderly aunt or the father of an old friend who had lived there for years and remembered that summer of 1959 very well, I was assured. But I'd already discovered that the memories of the Cook murders had suffered the same fate as any other story. Each version offered a bit of embellishment, a new twist on Cook's motive, or another theory as to who the real killer might have been. For now, I was confused enough with the conflicting opinions of the “experts” and it was probably best to leave any more wandering of the streets of Stettler until I had a real purpose. The little house at 5018 - 52
nd
St. was gone, an apartment building in its place. Present day Stettler had little to tell me about the Cook family, unless I could find the people who knew them.

We chatted, Clark and I, about weather, about the scorching heat to which he'd be returning in another week, and the dismal fall we were having here in Alberta, how the climate seemed to be changing. Or maybe, I thought,
our memories of the weather were just as susceptible to embellishment as all the other recollections. I'd remembered the summer of 1959 as oppressively hot. When I'd checked the national weather archives, their information said that on those days between the murders and discovery of the bodies, the daytime temperature averaged seventeen degrees with rain showers. In fact, the whole summer had been cool and wet.

For Clark, I was sure, it was a summer hung with cloud. He asked me who else I'd found, and how useful they'd been. He said he doubted much had been left unsaid. Nothing new to uncover. I told him it wasn't the details of the murder case or Cook's trials and execution I was examining, but what went before. It was the family I was interested in, someone who could give me insight into who Ray and Daisy were. I'd told him I was working on a book, one that might weave a fictional strand into the true story. I expected Louise to pipe up inside my head, but she was silent.

So far as anyone who knew the family—he shook his head. He thought his folks had known a few of the Cook's “people,” but Ray and Daisy as far as he could recollect, had pretty much kept to their own. Someone in Ray's family had looked after the funeral arrangements. He had no idea who they were.

His own family, he said, probably knew them best. Daisy and Ray Cook were the closest friends his mom and dad had at the time. The families went on picnics together. Gerry Cook had been Clark's best friend. Clark had spent most of his “younger years” at the Cook's house. Spent nights there. Staying with Gerry. He paused between sentences. In that house, he said, and paused again. A lot of time had gone by since those days.

When the phone rang and Clark excused himself to take the call, I picked up my copy of
The Work of Justice.
I wondered if Clark's book opened by habit, as mine did, to the photos. If he'd visited, slept over with Gerry Cook, he may have spent a night on the “Winnipeg couch” in one of the pictures. I remembered these utilitarian pieces of furniture in many homes when I was growing up. Sturdily built of iron and coil springs, they were armless and backless and opened out to form a double bed. The striped mattress on the Winnipeg couch in the photo was blood-stained—blood-soaked, according to the book. The bedroom walls were splashed with blood. The three boys, Gerry, Chrissy and Patty had slept in this bedroom at the back of the house. It held a single bed, the double couch and two dressers. One of the other photos was a group shot of the five children taken one week before the murder. The youngest, Linda, was three years old. She was dressed in a striped t-shirt and overalls, and looking off to the side. I imagined her mother, smiling, telling her to stay put. Just for a minute. Five-year-old Kathy was beside her wearing a sleeveless shirt and a cherub grin. The three boys, Gerry, Chrissy and Patty, nine, eight, and seven years old, all had thick mops of hair neatly trimmed up the sides and wore identical short-sleeved button-up shirts. In another earlier photo on the same page, there were only the three boys; Chrissy just a baby, and Gerry and Patty, all of them wearing the fingerprint of their mother in the one neat curl on the tops of their heads.

I closed the book, and looked out the window into the thinning fog.

When Clark sat down again, he told me that his brother,
Dillon, would be a good person for me to speak with. Dillon was older and knew Robert Cook well. The only other person in the Hoskins family who could have told me more was their dad who'd passed away three years ago.

Jim and Leona Hoskins were the last people to see the Cooks alive. When they stopped by for coffee that Thursday night, when they planned the picnic for Sunday, Ray had offered to help Jim move some furniture on Saturday. When Ray didn't appear, Jim went down to the Cook home and found the blinds drawn. There was no answer when he knocked on the door. The next morning, Bobby Cook called from the local jail asking Jim to post bail for him because there'd been some trouble over a car. Now Jim's puzzlement over the family's absence turned to real concern. He refused to help with bail.

It was Dillon who brought back the news that something bad, something very bad had happened at the Cook residence. He'd gone down to the house out of curiosity, and came home crying, this young man of twenty. There were yellow ribbons all around the place, he said, policemen everywhere. They'd shown him a bloody suit jacket. The one in which he'd seen Bobby Cook walk into town just a few days before. Oh yeah, Clark said, I can remember fully the day Dillon went down there and came back crying.

By evening, the Hoskinses knew the fate of their friends. Jim Hoskins was asked to go to the morgue and identify the bodies that night. And that, Clark said, was one of the things that truly did his dad in. One minute there's a friend you talked to on Thursday night and the next minute … he couldn't recognize any of them to identify them
.

Clark looked down at the book, and so did I. A grainy photo of Robert Raymond Cook who seemed to be apprehensively watching something in the foreground. A flip of the cover would open my book to a black and white of the infamous grease pit in the garage, taken shortly after the layers of cardboard had been peeled away. There was a tangle of greasy rags, clothing, two visible faces, and protruding sets of hands. I avoided that photo.

Clark cleared his throat, and folded his hands on the table in front of him. You were asking me what kind of people they were, he said.

As I'd expected, he described ordinary folk. Ray, always working, always fixing, doing something around the place. A good provider for what he had. And Daisy. An ordinary good mother, who loved the children, no doubt about that. Welcomed other kids, made her house a comfortable place to be, but homework before playtime, always a teacher as well as a mom.

And the other son? Bobby, Clark had called him just a few minutes before, and I'd found myself trying to match that name to the newspaper photos and articles which referred to him always as Robert Raymond Cook. In the collection of photos in
The Work of Justice
, there is one of a much younger Cook; a group shot of children, ranging in age from about five to nine years, I'd guess, labeled “Hanna birthday party.” Robert Raymond Cook, Bobby, is in the back row, oddly the only child formally dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie and looks a junior version of his neatly-suited self on the cover of J. Pecover's book.

Bobby, Clark said, had seemed like an “okay kid.” He'd come along to a relative's farm with the Hoskins family once when he was fresh from jail, and Clark's mother had said that he was destined for trouble. Each time his son came home again, Ray Cook tried to get him a job, give him a new start, and each time he was back in jail again within weeks, it seemed.

Ray Cook had dreamed of owning a service station, and Robert Cook insisted the family was supposed to have left for British Columbia by bus on Friday morning to scout out a location where he and his dad could be partners in a business. He said he'd given Ray $4100 toward the purchase and Ray had left him the car to exchange for a new vehicle for himself.

They may have talked about a partnership, Clark said, and Bobby and Ray may have been serious, but the plan was certainly not in the works that weekend. Ray and Daisy would not have gone off without telling anyone their intent. Of that Jim and Leona Hoskins were sure. They were good neighbours, good friends, people with whom they spent hours playing cards, drinking coffee, sitting around the kitchen. They didn't live “high class.” They had “the essentials” and that was it.

I imagined two women, two mothers with young families—Daisy with her five, Leona Hoskins with six children—sitting at the kitchen table in the modest Cook home, a pot of coffee on the stove. Daisy Cook was thirty-seven years old when she died. I wondered if she'd talked with Leona about the delinquent stepson. If anyone in the family talked about Bobby.

He embarrassed them, Clark said. In a small town, everyone knew what everyone else was up to. About 99% of the time Bobby wasn't around, because he was in jail.

He tapped the cover of the book. And then Bobby came back, he said, wearing that blue suit. The Hoskins lived out on the highway back then, and Dillon saw Bobby walking into town that day around noon.

Clark said he was very sure that Bobby knew what he was going to do when he came home that day. That he'd had lots of time in jail to figure it out. He was going to fix them. He was going to get that car, and he was going to have some fun for a weekend.

One of the puzzling aspects of the story is that the family was killed sometime Thursday night or early Friday morning, and though Robert Cook had left Stettler that same night—the last time he saw them alive, he maintained until he died—he returned to Stettler after two days of joy-riding in the new car he bought in Edmonton with money he insisted he'd dug up from long ago heists. Then he cruised Main Street, and went back to the house.

Clark told me that while this seemed like bizarre behaviour for a guilty man, to him it was consistent with the rest of the luck Cook made for himself.

How, I wondered would someone plan the murder of seven people. One murderer and seven victims?

Yes, Clark agreed, the way he killed the kids did make you wonder if he had help. Five kids. Gerry was Clark's age, just about to turn ten. And Chrissy not very much younger. And Patty. The girls were so small, but the boys? Active, energetic kids always running, building tree forts. Today, he said, kids are trained to phone 911, or to run for help. These were not stupid kids. That's always been on his mind. How could someone beat five children to death with the butt of a gun, and not one of them get away?

The phone rang again, this time a cell phone on the kitchen counter and Clark rose to answer it. I busied myself jotting notes, but mostly pondering a nine-year-old boy remembering nights he spent in a bedroom that became the scene of unspeakable carnage.

I glanced at my watch. I'd taken more than the hour of Clark's time that I'd requested. He was home for another week and then back to the Middle East for six weeks, a schedule he'd told me that would allow him to retire in a few more years. Then he and his wife were going south.