Free The Boy by Betty Jane Hegerat Page A

change outcomes. But this story had its own ending, and the only details allowed were the facts.
    The most salient facts were missing. No one knew what happened in the house on late Thursday night, June 25, 1959. Or Friday. Or Saturday. But the Sunday discovery of the blood-soaked bed and spattered walls, the pit full of bodies, gave rise to lurid imagining. In fact, I had to put my books aside by late afternoon or I was kept awake by images of little children in pyjamas cowering in the corner of a shabby living room.
    The best way to dislodge the grisly bits of information in my head, I decided, was to follow the story to its end, and let everyone rest in peace. I knew from experience that if I stayed too long with a story idea in my head, worked it around without putting all the words on the page, there was the danger that it would be finished before it was written. I found myself secretly hoping that this would be the case with the Cook story. And Louise was annoying me enough that I would have been happy to throw her story unfinished into the drawer as well.
    What I discovered very early in my pursuit of the Cook family was that there were more questions than answers. Opinion was sharply divided as to Robert Raymond Cook’s guilt. There were conflicting stories dredged up out of failing memories, but a deep-seated interest wherever I went. What became abundantly clear was that Robert Raymond Cook was part of the history of central Alberta. Equally clear, that few people remembered the individual members of the family. Even people who lived in the town of Stettler at the time recalled only that there were “several” children, and that they were pitifully small.
    So I set out to find these people, restore them from their infamy as the “murdered Cook family” to seven ordinary human beings. And what of their relationship with their son, stepson, half-brother?
    That’s what I want to know.

Roads Back
    Who were these people? I knew where they’d ended. The Pecover book had a photo of a snow-banked headstone in the Hanna cemetery as a frontispiece. So far my search had taken me to Stettler, Red Deer, and Lacombe, but there’d been no particular reason to visit Robert Raymond Cook’s home town. It had been over a year since I picked up the Pecover book at the Hillhurst flea market. A long fall and winter of reading, some formal interviewing, a lot of informal talk—so many people who remembered this crime. But I had not felt inclined to trudge through a desolate winter landscape looking for graves.
    Then came a day of prairie summer at her best; milky-blue sky a mile high, the scraping song of grasshoppers, dusty smell of gravel roads and new-mown clover, and barely enough breeze to dry the trickle of sweat down my neck. We’d been to Saskatoon for a weekend jaunt with the same friends with whom we’d dined at Longview. They knew I’d been digging around in the Cook case ever since. They were not surprised when I suggested a stop in Hanna.
    Which cemetery, the kid at the service station asked when we stopped for directions. The Catholic one or the regular one? I made a blind guess. Regular. About ten miles north, he told me, pointing down the main road that ran through town. His guess was less reliable than mine. It was barely a mile to the wooden archway at the entrance to the cemetery. Like so many country graveyards, this one was set on a hill, bordered along the road by low-growing shrubs, and along the other perimeters by the barbed wire fences of the farmland out of which it was carved.
    We fanned out, each to a quadrant. I started at the highest point, thinking there might be a pattern and I’d be able to work my way to 1959 by following the dates of death on the stones. I should have known better from previous
cemetery wanderings. There was always a mix of old and new, plots purchased long before the owners had taken up residence. After ten minutes of wandering,