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in the basement. In a few minutes, they’d stomp up to the kitchen to chomp through a mountain of food before they moved to the basketball hoop. Goofy teenagers, with nothing more pressing on their minds than how to spend the rest of a sultry afternoon.
    By the time Robert Raymond Cook was sixteen years old, he had graduated from reform school to big-time jail. His mother died when he was nine years old. In the solitary company of his mechanic father, he’d learned to drive by the time he was ten, and developed a passion for other people’s cars. From his first incarceration for car theft when he was fourteen years old, until his execution at twenty-three, he spent all but 243 days of 3247 days in prison. I imagined him, a young teenager, playing basketball in the exercise yard of the Lethbridge provincial jail.
    I made the mistake of returning to the book later that night. At three in the morning, I was wide-eyed, grisly bits of information running in my head like squirrels in cages.
    The next day, I buried The Work of Justice under a pile of other books I’d set aside for summer reading. Anne Marie McDonald’s, The Way the Crow Flies , was at the top of the pile. I knew the book was about a murder, but it was fiction.
    McDonald’s fiction threw me right back into 1959. Although The Way the Crow Flies is fiction, a novel, it seemed to me clearly informed by the Lynne Harper/Steven Truscott murder case. Once again, I was eleven years old, imagining a girl just my age riding into a summer afternoon on her bike, and never coming home again. I went back to the internet for information about Steven Truscott.
    Fourteen year old Truscott was scheduled to be hanged for the murder of Lynne Harper two days before Robert Raymond Cook was sentenced to death. Truscott’s sentence was commuted. A similar plea for clemency was made on Cook’s behalf, and according to J. Pecover, author of my flea-market-found book, the odds seemed good. John Diefenbaker, who was Prime Minister at the time, was outspoken in his hatred of the death penalty. Unfortunately for Cook, there was an election looming and Diefenbaker was advised that he would lose the west if he showed clemency in a crime so heinous as the Cook murders.
    I finished The Way the Crow Flies, satisfied in the end that it is a fictitious rendering. I knew all I needed to know about the Cook murders, and it was time to go back to Louise’s story. Fiction. I knew how to spin a story. Surely I could leave the Cook family to their rest.
    Why are you so sure they’re at rest? If it were me…
    It is not you, Louise. Danny is not a murderer.
    How do we know this?
    You know it because I’m telling you it’s so.
    And if I don’t believe you? Maybe you’re wrong.
    I’d like to remind you that I’m in charge here.
    Ah, but you keep changing the story. Maybe Ray and Daisy Cook thought they knew Robert. Do you think they called him Robert? Why did the reporters always use his full name? So there would be no mistaking another Cook for the murderer?
    I suppose. Maybe Ray and Daisy called him Bob. Or Bobby.
    Bobby? A Bobby does not bludgeon little children.
    Okay, so he was not Bobby. He was Robert Raymond Cook and he killed his family.
    An entire family. Including his stepmother, half brothers, half sisters.
    So?
    So what about me?
    You are not Daisy. You don’t have any other children.
    Well unless the story stops here, that’s a distinct possibility, isn’t it?

The Boy
    December 1994
    Christmas, and this year Louise has a new family to circle around the tree. She and Jake were married on December 7 in a civil ceremony, Jake’s cousin and one of Louise’s teaching friends as witnesses. Jake thought it best to leave Danny out of the ceremony, but include him later for the small dinner party at the Italian restaurant where Jake had proposed to Louise. An old-fashioned, candlelit presentation of a