The Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

bungalow, and she certainly wasn’t inflicting another on Rose’s beleaguered mother.
    It wasn’t a slumber party Rose had on her mind when she pounded into our yard that day, Monday, June 30 when the news of the Cook murders broke. It was likely the last day of school. No early exits in those days. I imagine that Rose and I had hauled our bags of end-of-the-year grade five books and papers to our respective houses, that she reappeared just before suppertime, which at our house was the early hour of five o’clock, as soon as my dad walked through the door.
    Memory tells me I was outside, sitting on the back step, pouting. Because my mother had refused another sleepover? Because I was prone to pouting and it was the surest way to irk my mother? In my memory, too, there is the smell of meat frying, my mother busy in the kitchen but keeping an eye on me through the open window, ready to come out and tell me that if I was sulking and bored already, she’d find some work to keep me busy. Boredom irked her even more than pouting.
    Then Rose, wide-eyed, breathless, hair dangling around her ears from the ponytail that never lasted the day, racing along the cotoneaster hedge that separated our yard from the alley. Bringing the news. Dead bodies in a hole in the floor in a garage. Bodies of little children. This is the news I remember.
    Rose would have heard it from one of her brothers. But her brothers were forever trying to scare her with creepy stories about graveyards and people buried alive and rats climbing into babies’ cribs and gnawing off their fingers and toes. We didn’t even have rats in Alberta and yet she believed them. So why would I believe a story about a pit full of bodies?
    Because it was on the radio, she said, and Rose’s oldest brother knew the person who they said had done the awful
killing. Robert Raymond Cook. I can hear Rose pronouncing his name like she was broadcasting the news herself. All summer long we would hear him formally named.
    No, I insisted, this couldn’t be true. Especially when she told me that he was the son, the brother of the dead children. I didn’t have brothers, just one older sister, but I did have a sense of what brothers would or wouldn’t do. Tease, torment, bully, but not murder. It must have been a stranger. If Stettler was anything like the small town we’d left behind, then a stranger was the answer.
    My mother verified Rose’s story when she came outside to find out what we were quarrelling about. She had heard the news from Stettler, and if she had heard, it had to be true. It was not the sort of information she deemed suitable for eleven-year-old girls, though, and she sent Rose home. The radio that usually played during supper so my dad could hear the weather report was turned off. The Edmonton Journal disappeared the next evening as quickly as the paperboy dropped it on the front step. But Rose was my pipeline, and eventually we got the story in its ghastly entirety. The children had been “bludgeoned” to death. I got out the Miriam Webster for that one, and for “stench” which I heard my dad quietly ponder to my mother. My dad didn’t share my mom’s strict prohibitions on what we were allowed to hear. If my mom was out, or distracted, he would let us sneak into the living room and watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents . My mother was sure Hitchcock would plant the seeds of nightmare. Lassie, Ozzie and Harriet , those were shows suitable for children. If I could find my dad out in the garage, or in the basement, away from her keen ears, he would give me at least a censored version of the Cook story. Rose could be counted on to fill in the gore.
    So, there were seven bodies, five children, the eldest a year younger than me. The son was a jailbird, just out of “the clink” my dad would have said, a few days before the killings. And if I asked how Robert Raymond Cook was captured, Rose might have