The Boy Read online

  “The man who wrote that article thinks he was innocent.”

  “Oh yeah, lots of people on that side of the fence but just as many on the other.” He stands up, rolls his shoulders, and gives his head a shake. “Gruesome stuff. I’ll get rid of this whole box. I doubt there’s anything in there we need.”

  “No, leave it. There are some cookbooks. Leave it, and I’ll sort through later.” She tries to appear distracted, as though it’s no big deal. “Busy day down at the coffee shop?”

  “The after-church crowd,” he says. “A bunch of grey-haired women fighting to hold the little guy. I drank my coffee and ate my flapper pie, and they still wouldn’t give him back.”

  “No wonder Dan cut out.” The boy was well-trained when it came to meeting adults, but Louise has noticed that he never suffers more than five minutes before he comes up with an excuse to leave the room.

  “Everybody asked about you.” Jake bends down and strokes the baby’s cheek with his thumb. “I told them things are getting a little more organized around here and you probably wouldn’t mind an invitation to coffee. Maybe you could do the inviting?”

  Likely Brenda was planning dinner parties for twelve and volunteering at the hospital three weeks after Daniel was born. “Phyllis is going to stop by this week when she’s in town,” Louise says. “Frankly, that’s about all the socializing I feel up to just now. Maybe in a week or so we can invite the Schultzes over for coffee some evening.” The old couple who live next door welcomed them with a basket of cookies the day they moved in, chatted over the fence, offered advice on the garden.

  Jake frowns. “They’re a bit miffed with me,” he says. “Henry and I had words last week.”

  Even before he explains, Louise knows this is about Daniel. She heard Henry shouting at Daniel one afternoon. “About…?”

  “Aw, he says somebody’s been in his garage, messing around with his tools. He’s missing a few things. Cripes, Lou, he’s eighty-five years old. He’s probably given the stuff to his kids and forgotten all about it. The place has a padlock and chain across the door that would give Houdini a run for his money.”

  And a small cardboard-covered window on the alley side, Louise thinks, that wouldn’t be difficult for a small body to wriggle through. “You weren’t rude to him, were you?” Normally easy-going Jake can be sharp and dismissive. Surely not to an old man, though.

  “I told him I’d speak to Dan, but turns out he already did. I wasn’t rude, but I probably let him know I thought he was out of line. He should have come to me first.”

  “And did you speak to Danny?”

  He nods. “He said he hasn’t been anywhere near that garage, and why would he want to go in anyway because it’s full of old junk. Pretty much what I was thinking.”

  She closes her eyes. She can hear Danny’s voice saying those words, see the slight squint of his eyes, his teeth catching his lower lip. She would have snapped back at the boy, asked him how he knew about the junk if he hadn’t been in the garage.

  “You believed him?”

  “Of course I believed him. Judas Priest, Louise! He’s my son. I should take the word of a senile old man over that of my own son?”

  She looks away so that he won’t see the nod in her eyes. Yes, Jake, when the son is a liar, we start from a different place.

  “I didn’t mention it before,” Jake says, “because you have enough on your mind here. It’ll blow over.”

  Blow over, and maybe Jake’s questioning will have been enough to deter Danny. Meanwhile she’ll speak to Mrs. Schultz. Go over tomorrow with a thank you card for the booties and hat the old woman crocheted for Jon.

  Jake walks to the window. “I wonder where that kid got to. I’m going to go for a drive and see if I can find him.”

  When the baby is asleep in his basket again, Louise returns to the clippings. She’s skimmed the newest pieces, an Edmonton Sun series written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders. How bizarre, she thinks, to be holding an anniversary for a gruesome murder. The man who wrote the piece didn’t hedge. He thought the wrong man had been hanged. Louise thinks suddenly of her dad, how she wishes she could ask him if he remembers this crime, and what he thought. She’s sure that if a court of law said it was so, then for her dad it would have been so. Black and white, or at least as dark a shade of grey as it took to make a judgment. She is also sure he would have said, “Hindsight’s 20/20, Louise. Everybody’s a Monday morning quarterback.” She wonders about her mom, whether the name might flick a switch and illuminate one of those patches of long ago memory that occasionally surprise Louise when she visits.

  The older pieces are worn at the folds, as soft as flannel to the touch and most of them marred by the dark stain on the envelope in which she found them. A cup of coffee? Young Brenda’s bottle of coca-cola splashed across the collection? From what she knows of Brenda, Louise imagines her frowning, blotting the envelope, looking for a new one to replace it with. She riffles through again, looking for the headline that clutched her by the throat just as Jake came through the door. “Place Usurped by Hated Stepmother. Spoiled Son Turns to Crime.” Robert Cook was hanged for murdering his father, stepmother, and their five children. Jake is right. Even though the headline is ridiculously sensationalist, worthy of a grocery store check-out tabloid, this is gruesome. She should throw it all away. She piles the papers onto the back of a shelf at the top of the bedroom closet.

  Jake’s visit with the Sunday morning coffee crowd prompts a phone call from Phyllis on Monday morning. She’s planning a baby shower. What day would be best? Jake works evenings all week, they have only one car, Phyllis lives about five miles out of town, and it’s a problem to leave Daniel home alone in the evening. But Phyllis is dauntless. One of the women from town will be happy to give Louise a ride, and Dan of course is welcome to come along. He flatly refuses. Boring, he says. Phyllis is from the traditional Mennonite side of Jake’s family. No television or computers in their house. The kids, Dan says, are “dorky” and the farm is a drag and Paul, Phyllis’s husband, is mean. He made Dan help with chores when he spent a weekend at the farm right after Jon was born.

  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 52nd 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 litt
le 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.