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described a car chase, with her brother in the lead, heading Cook off at the junction service station. My dad would probably have told me that they didn’t have to catch Cook. He was parked outside the coffee shop in downtown Stettler, showing off his new car.
    It turned out Rose’s brother didn’t really know Robert Raymond Cook, except that he’d been at a party Cook crashed a year or two before. But what seemed to be accepted by everyone as truth from the moment the news hit the front page, was that Robert Raymond Cook “did it.”
    Cook was sent to Ponoka, to the provincial mental hospital, for psychiatric examination before his trial. That was the second chapter in the story I had stored in my memory. For anybody growing up in Alberta, Ponoka was synonymous with craziness. It still is. Yesterday, from the window of this room, I heard my neighbour saying goodbye to a visitor. “I should be in Ponoka by now!” the woman said. Laughed and drove away, leaving me to wonder what was driving her mad.
    If Cook was sent to Ponoka then, in my eleven-year-old mind, he was as crazy as could be. And guilty. Much of my memory of that summer is set on the three block stretch between my house and Rose’s. We must have trudged back and forth, whispering about murder, about brothers and boys. Though the Cook murders had dislodged it from our minds temporarily, another murder earlier in June had been centre stage. A girl in Ontario, exactly our age, out riding her bike, had never come home. Her body had been found in a field two days later, strangled, sexually assaulted. I didn’t need Miriam Webster for those words. At eleven, Rose and I were better informed about sex than we were about violence. A fourteen-year-old boy, Stephen Truscott, had already been charged with the murder of Lynne Harper when the Cook family was murdered.
    It was officially summer, two lazy months during which Rose and I would have ventured out on the gravel roads around town, Cheez Whiz sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and milk bottles full of Kool-Aid in the baskets on the front of our bikes. So long as we were back by suppertime, no one would have worried. But on July 10, Robert Raymond Cook broke out of Ponoka, and our wandering came to a quick halt. My mother didn’t need to place restrictions. Rose and I imagined a murderer, one with particular interest in children, hiding behind every tree, and even if we’d been allowed, we weren’t likely to wander farther than the playground within shouting distance of my house.
    Even though he was captured three days later, the final chapter in my memory of Robert Raymond Cook, it seemed as though our summer-time freedom was irrevocably lost.
    So this is your story now?
    No. That’s as far as we need to go with my story.
    Well you’re ignoring mine. And what about the Cooks?
    What about them? They’ve been dead for forty-six years.
    What happened to them?
    I am not writing a story about bludgeoning and hanging.
    Not that part. What happened before. Why did he kill them?
    Why does it matter?
    That’s the question, isn’t it? I knew you weren’t finished with them yet.

Roads Back
    I found three books on the Cook case. The Robert Cook Murder Case, published by Gopher Books, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was part of a series on infamous prairie murder cases by Frank W. Anderson. I ordered the book from a bookstore in Saskatoon, and tracked the other two books to the Calgary Public library which had one copy of each at the main branch.
    They Were Hanged, by Alan Hustak, is an account of the last man executed in every province in Canada before the death penalty was eliminated in 1976. Photos of doomed men, one woman, introduce each chapter. Too much for me, I flipped to the picture of Robert Cook, the same image that must have accompanied the long ago newspaper articles because it was a match for the one that had been gaining focus in my mind since the