The Cooper Brothers

Chapter 1

11am, Tuesday, June 5, 2012

There was also nothing out of the ordinary on the Tuesday afternoon 15 years later that Francesca Cooper went missing. It was a muggy summer day in the middle of June in Toronto. Nicholas was bounding up the steps of Robarts Library on his way to meet his girlfriend Sophia on the 11th floor. She had made some sandwiches and Nicholas was famished. He had 20 minutes before he’d be needed back in his stuffy King’s College office.

“What now?” Nicholas sighed when he felt his back pocket vibrate. “Hello?”

“Hey, Nick, I think you need to come over,” Jack said quietly into the phone.

“I can’t right now, Jack,” Nicholas sighed.

Though Jack lived in the east end of Toronto close to the beach, a 20 minute car ride away from Nicholas and Sophia’s rented apartment in the Annex in the west end, the brothers saw each other only a few times a year. The Gardiner Expressway, a major highway in the city, that sliced Toronto in half, echoed the divide that constantly dogged their relationship growing up. Nicholas, the compliant son and studious schoolboy, was often on the receiving end of Francesca’s exuberant praise while Jack was the recipient of her ire, at times even gleefully inviting his mother’s contempt.

“You have to study hard, Nick,” she would often tell her son. “You don’t want to end up like Jack.”

Jack had a learning disability and had a hard time at school. Always creating trouble for his classmates and teachers, earning him the reputation of a hopeless delinquent, Jack did what he thought was a favour to everyone and dropped out school altogether at 17. He found work as a line cook soon after at a diner and began exhibiting a discipline his mother never thought he possessed but ran into trouble eight months into the job. Liquor was mysteriously disappearing from the bar and Jack’s reputation and elaborate arm tattoos branded him as the culprit. A month after he was fired in a loud altercation with the restaurant manager, the bartender’s girlfriend was caught stuffing tip money into a bag she had already stuffed with Johnnie Walker.

It was too late. Jack had already lived up to the potential of a son of a drunkard who not only left his wife, but left her with an appetite for the strong stuff. Mother and son would sling hurtful words at each other trying to up the other with the greater invective. As the years passed, the two mellowed to a state of annoyed acceptance and indifference. Francesca found some success in her role as a pharmaceutical rep and was transferred to a higher position managing a fleet of salespeople in Ottawa. Two years ago, she packed up her belongings and moved to a neat condo near the Rideau and was thankful for the opportunity to give Jack a chance to grow up once and for all. She was satisfied that he had found work stocking shelves at a local grocery store in the evenings and wanted to believe that he’d finally learned how to be responsible. Handing over the keys to her house, she asked her son to move in and tasked him with maintaining the house in her absence.

On June 1 - a Friday - in Toronto for a meeting with clients, Francesca showed up unannounced at her house. Jack was in the kitchen stuffing his pipe, readying himself for a night in front of the TV. The house was a mess. Jack had never been especially clean, but the place was teetering on unlivable. Piles of garbage sat on whatever floor space was not taken up by furniture, fuzzy green mold was growing on unwashed dishes that sat neglected on the kitchen counter and litter boxes emanated a pungent smell from six cats that refused to use them, they were so filthy.

Francesca was livid.

11:02 am, Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Slowly, Nicholas would begin to realize that the promise he made to his mother when he was 9 was going to be more complicated than he ever imagined.

“You have to come over,” Jack said quietly. “Some cops want to talk to you.”

“What did you do now, Jack?” Nicholas said in exasperation. A couple of years ago, he was summoned to a police station to pick his brother up after a particularly bad bar fight that left his opponent with a deep gash on skull that required 15 stitches – about 10 stitches away from a charge of attempted murder, according to the officer on duty.

“I haven’t seen mom since Friday so I called the cops,” Jack said. “What if something happened to her?”

In spite of the rage Nicholas felt toward his brother for not telling him their mother was missing sooner, his concern overtook his emotions and he managed a feeble, “I’m coming.”

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“I don’t know,” Jack said. “She was acting very strange…I could tell she was drinking...she was so angry because of the house and then she left. She didn’t say where she was going.”

Francesca’s rental car, a nondescript grey Camry, was gone, but her cell phone and purse still sat unbothered at the foot of the stairs. “Why would she leave without any of her stuff?” Nicholas said shakily. “That makes no sense. And why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner? Nothing’s changed. You’re so goddamned irresponsible.”

According to Jack, after hours of interrogation by the Toronto Police and Nicholas, the night of her disappearance, Francesca tore through the house, howling and sobbing. Abruptly, she stormed out and got into her rental car and screeched down the street, neglecting to take any of her belongings with her.

The last person to see Francesca was the subject of past and present disappointment and anger. If police suspected Jack of any wrongdoing, they didn’t show it in the days after he reported her disappearance. They would routinely call on him to ask and re-ask about the most minute details of their last meeting. For his part, Nicholas was concerned for his brother who had given numerous detailed taped statements to the police without a lawyer present. One wrong word or misremembered detail could land his brother in jail. Nicholas’ fierce loyalty to his brother made him disproportionately angry with the police and detectives who ransacked their mother’s home looking for clues and scoured the city for her missing rental car. As the days passed, the chance of finding Francesca alive dwindled, according to police.

“Maybe she went on an online date that went wrong,” Nicholas said one night as he peered searchingly into Sophie’s eyes looking for reassurance. “Or what if she got drunk but thought she was ok to drive and got lost and took a nap on the side of the road and something happened to her?”