The Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

drive to Longview. The Hustak account is short and sympathetic to Cook, I found to my surprise. Full of questions about the circumstantial nature of the evidence and political motives for denying the request for a commuted sentence. But at the end of it, another reader had penned, “They should have hanged Bob Cook ‘7’ times.” And he signed his note, “JD.”
    The photo on the cover of The Work of Justice, The Trials of Robert Raymond Cook by J. Pecover was also familiar; a photo of a young man in suit jacket and tie, hair combed straight back, looking as though he could have been on his way to a school dance, or a first job interview. The book is four hundred and forty-nine pages, with two epigraphs:
    â€œWho shall put his finger on the work of justice and say, ‘It is there.’ Justice is like the kingdom of God; it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning.”
    â€” George Elliott
    â€œThe whole case agianst me consists of suspision and if theres any justice in this world something will be done. However I am beginning to have serious doubts as to weither or not there is any such thing as justice.”
    â€” “Letter from the death cell” Robert Raymond Cook
    There is a foreword by Sheila Watson, author of The Double Hook, a novel which, I remembered with a jolt, opens with a man killing his mother. Even in the ten minutes I spent at a table in the library, skim reading, I found myself reaching for my pencil and the pad of post-it notes I carried in my bag. I put the pencil away. I would find my own copy for marking and defacing. Mr. Pecover, I decided, had a lot to tell me. The back cover said only: “Jack Pecover is a retired lawyer and an alumni member of the Canadian Rodeo Cowboys Association.” What I knew from the heft of this book was that Jack Pecover had spent a long time and a huge amount of energy examining the trials of Robert Raymond Cook.
    An online search for the book led me to a used bookseller in Calgary. He would be at the Sunday morning flea market at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Centre, he told me in reply to my email.
    There was one lone customer at the bookseller’s stall when I arrived on Sunday morning, a woman working her way through stacks of romance novels. In spite of the suffocating heat in the building, the man behind the table was wearing a heavy cardigan sweater. He seemed to be waiting for me; before I could speak, he dipped into a stash under the table and handed me the book.
    I flipped to the publication date: 1996. This copy looked new, although the pages gave off the unmistakable musty smell of old book. I wondered who’d owned this, why they dumped it. I asked the seller if he’d had the book for long.
    He shrugged, said it wasn’t exactly a hot number, but he’d sold a few copies in the past couple of years.
    Then, I asked him if he remembered the murder case, a question I’d been posing to many people. He looked the right vintage. But he was from Quebec, he told me, where they have their own long list of bloody backwoods crime. Twenty bucks, he said, obviously not interested in chatting.
    The romance woman, balancing her pile of books under her chin, wanted his attention. I pulled a twenty dollar bill out of my wallet and he snipped it up with two fingers and a wink.
    All afternoon, I sat in the garden swing and read. By the time I reluctantly put the book aside, new images of Robert Raymond Cook had lifted off the pages; a boy barely able to peer over the steering wheel of a stolen car; the police chief in the village of Hanna, Alberta, in hot pursuit, muttering, that’s young Cook for sure. A boy who loved animals, and who was forever bringing home stray dogs. A boy who was markedly fond of younger children. A young man who carried photos of his five siblings and showed them proudly.
    While I read, my sixteen year-old son and two of his friends were pounding out music