The Dreams of Ada Read online

  The Timmons brothers had already left when he got there. He was filled in by Gene Whelchel, Harvey Phillips, Monroe Atkeson. Baskin, too, gave no thought to fingerprints, to possible evidence. The clerk apparently had been abducted. His first priority was to find that light-colored pickup, to find the girl.

  He called the highway patrol, arranged to meet several officers at a nearby intersection. Just as the officers arrived, an orange pickup ran a stop sign. Baskin and the others went after it when the truck sped away. It wasn’t the right color, but it was fleeing.

  The truck finally stopped on a dead-end street. Baskin and the patrolmen approached, warily. Inside were two young men and a girl. They were scared. He had fled, the driver said, because he did not want to get a traffic ticket for running the stop sign. Neither the truck nor the girl matched the descriptions from McAnally’s. The officers didn’t bother to write a ticket. They had more important things to do just then.

  They divided the town into areas to search. Baskin, twenty-eight years old, round-faced, stocky, a policeman for eight years, a detective for one, drove out east along the highway for two miles beyond McAnally’s. He turned right onto a narrow blacktop that led to a development called Deer Creek Estates. Here, he knew, there were houses scattered acres apart, on rolling hills, far from the highway. If you wanted to assault someone in a quiet place, where her cries would not be heard, and leave her with a long walk back to the road, so you had time to get away, this might be the place. Baskin cruised the dividing and redividing narrow blacktops, looking for the grayish pickup. He found nothing but dark trees silhouetted against the sky.

  He headed back toward town, cruised the narrow streets. Nothing. He went out to Kerr Lab, a federal environmental research facility at the southern end of town; it is set far back from the main road, behind a large parking area, surrounded on three sides by thick woodlands—another likely spot for rape and abandonment. He did not find the truck or the girl.

  He drove back to McAnally’s, where the others were milling around. He decided he’d better let his boss know about this one. He telephoned Detective Captain Smith at home.

  The captain and his wife were already asleep. They had to deliver newspapers in the morning. Smith listened groggily to Mike Baskin’s tale.

  “Treat it as a crime scene,” he said.

  He hung up the phone and soon went back to sleep.

  Months later, Dennis Smith would think ruefully that, had he known all that was to follow, he would have gone to the scene himself that night. But there was no way of knowing, even then, if that would have made a difference.

  In the small apartment above the dental offices of Dr. Jack B. Haraway, one of several apartments in the two-story brick building, Steve Haraway’s studying was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Was this Steve Haraway?—yes—whose wife works as a clerk at McAnally’s?—yes—is she at home?—no, she’s working tonight—well, you’d better get over to McAnally’s, your wife is missing.

  Missing?

  He hurried down the flight of stairs, tall, thin, dark-haired, light-complexioned. He had talked to Denice on the phone less than two hours ago, about 7:30. When he got home from work. They talked around that time every night on the four days she worked: Thursday through Sunday. Missing? Nothing had been wrong; things had been slow at the store; she’d been able to get some studying done.

  He drove out on Mississippi, curled right at the four-way stop sign.

  They’d met nearly two years before, when Denice—Donna Denice Lyon, then—moved into an apartment in the building owned by his father. He was living in a smaller apartment then. She moved in along with her younger sister, Janet. He and Gary May had stood there and watched them move in. Very pretty, Donna Denice was, though shy. She’d be going to East Central.

  He sped out Arlington, going east, past the blinking yellow caution light at the entrance to Valley View Hospital. Directly across from it was We-Pak-Um, where he himself had worked all day. It was still open.

  They’d been married in August, at the First Christian Church, in which his parents were active. An imposing edifice, across the street diagonally from the courthouse square, from the county courthouse. He sped out Arlington. Invisible in the darkness on the right was the foundation of a new building, a future law office: Wyatt & Addicott.

  And then, a quarter mile farther, McAnally’s.

  Yes, that was her driver’s license. Yes, that was her purse, her car keys. Yes, that was her car parked beside the building. Her schoolbooks. Yes. Yes.

  No, he wasn’t sure what she’d been wearing; he’d been gone when she left for work. But he could be pretty sure. Blue jeans. She always wore blue jeans to work. And tennis shoes. They were comfortable. Some kind of blouse—he didn’t know which one today—and a hooded sweatshirt that zipped up the front. She usually took the sweatshirt; it was cold in the walk-in cooler. Yes.

  There was nothing more he could do here. If she called, she would call him at home. He’d better get home and wait by the phone. Yes. If they learned any more, they could call him there.

  He went home to the apartment. When he and Denice got married, they’d moved into hers; hers was bigger. The telephone still was listed in her name, Donna Haraway, though she much preferred Denice. Her things were all about, intermingled with his. Nothing was out of place in the apartment; no clothes, no suitcases were missing.

  Only she.

  He stood, sat, stood. Waited for Denice to call. The word only eight months old on his tongue: his wife.

  In Ada, as in many rural areas, convenience stores are a part of everyday life that scarcely exists in major metropolitan centers: Al’s Qwik Stop, Beep & Buy, Butler’s Mini Mart, Circle K, E-Z Mart, Love’s, McAnally’s, Sweeney’s, We-Pak-Um, others. Main Street is still a busy shopping area, but except for the movie theater it is pretty much locked up and deserted by 6 P.M. For those who need gas and don’t mind serving themselves—most people in Ada don’t mind—or who want a pack of cigarettes or a six-pack of beer, a container of milk, a fast-reading magazine to help pass the evening, the convenience stores are the places to drive to. In some, such as Butler’s or J.P.’s Pak-to-Go, you can shoot a game of pool on a single table in a partitioned-off game room, if you don’t mind the noise from the electronic games against the walls. In others, such as Love’s Country Stores on Main Street or Mississippi, you can sit in a pastel curved plastic booth and sip coffee from a paper cup or eat a prefab Saran-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich. The convenience stores provide a welcome source of jobs for college students and for women with no job skills, whose children are grown. The risk in being the lone clerk in one of these stores late in the evening comes with the $3.75 an hour. Some store owners lessened this risk by keeping two clerks on duty at all times. Others, such as O. E. McAnally, didn’t. McAnally’s did not have a game room or food tables, both of which, incidentally, reduce the risk of robbery by keeping customers in the place. Nor did it have an alarm system.

  The fact that Denice Haraway worked in a convenience store was of little concern to her family. Such stores and fast-food restaurants were their way of life. When Denice was growing up in Purcell, a small town thirty miles to the west, her mother managed the local Dairy Queen; from the time she was thirteen, Denice worked there after school. When she graduated from Purcell High School and the family moved to Ada, her mother got a job managing the Love’s Country Store on Mississippi; Denice went to work there. Even as she was working in McAnally’s that night, her younger sister, Janet Weldon, was working in a convenience store near her own home in Shawnee, forty-five miles to the north. The two sisters often called each other, store to store, to chat during slow times.

  Between 6:30 and 7 on April 28, Janet called Denice at McAnally’s. They chatted for a time, sister stuff; Janet was hoping to come down to Ada soon, to go on a shopping spree. Then Denice said she had to hang up, there were customers in the store. She would call back later.

  Several hours passed. Denice did
not call back. Janet, in Shawnee, dialed McAnally’s again. A man answered. Janet asked to speak to Denice. She couldn’t do that, she was told. Denice was missing.

  Frightened, Janet hung up, called their mother, who lived once again near Purcell. Something was wrong. Denice was missing, the police had said.

  Janet hurried to her car, drove through the darkness toward Ada. In Purcell, the girls’ mother, Pat Virgin, divorced from their father and remarried, was frantic. She got into the family car with her husband. He drove her through the night to Ada.

  O. E. McAnally, a slim, white-haired gentleman who owned the store, was at his home in another town, 110 miles away, when he was called by Gene Whelchel; his number was posted on the wall in case of emergency. He told his wife what had happened. They liked Denice Haraway; she had worked for them for almost a year; she was solid, reliable; she had passed each lie-detector test that O. E. McAnally made his employees take periodically, to make sure they weren’t stealing from him. Together, McAnally and his wife made the two-hour drive to Ada.

  Another young woman working in a convenience store that night was Karen Wise. In her twenties, slim, wearing glasses, a lot of dark hair framing her face, Miss Wise was working at J.P.’s Pak-to-Go, three-tenths of a mile east of McAnally’s—the very last store out on the highway. She had been working there only a few weeks. As sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen fanned out to look for the gray pickup, one of them stopped at J.P.’s. He told Karen Wise that the clerk at McAnally’s was missing, and he asked her if anything unusual had happened at J.P.’s that night. Miss Wise said that, as a matter of fact, yes. Two men had been in the store, shooting pool in the game room, she said, and they had given her the creeps, especially the way one of them kept looking at her; they’d been acting weird, she said; then they’d left and driven off in an old-model pickup. That had been about 8:30, she told the officer—which was a few minutes before Lenny and David Timmons and Gene Whelchel drove up to McAnally’s.

  It was Saturday night, late. McAnally’s was dark, but not deserted. Monroe Atkeson, the manager, having turned off the outside lights, sat alone, hoping the phone would ring, hoping Denice would call. In the apartment at Fourteenth and Rennie, her clothes were in the closet, her makeup in the bathroom; all her personal possessions were there. Steve Haraway sat among them, waiting for her to call. At police headquarters her mother was near collapse. She could hardly walk, had to be supported by her husband. Janet Weldon was there. They talked about Denice, about how when Janet spoke to her earlier in the evening nothing had been wrong. They recalled the last time they had seen her, two weeks before, at a family gathering at Ron’s house. Ron Lyon was Denice and Janet’s brother, was married, had three kids; they talked tearfully about how much Denice loved the kids; about how she was not planning to have her own right away, but how down the road a bit she would.

  Detective Baskin watched discreetly. There was nothing he could say to comfort them. He saw their tears, their terror; he pitied them. But he felt he had to be honest in response to their questions. The more time that goes by without hearing from Denice, he told them, the less hope there will be.

  He gave them a form to fill out, for missing persons: name, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color; places for any birthmarks, any scars; a place for her dental records.

  At the Ada Evening News, on Broadway at Tenth Street, the presses rolled, shuddered, printing the Sunday edition. There was no story in the paper about the disappearance of Denice Haraway. It had happened too late; the news would have to wait till Monday. On Interstate 40 a delivery truck sped toward Ada from Oklahoma City, carrying the early edition of the Sunday Oklahoman, which Detective Smith and his wife would hurl onto lawns in the morning; it, too, had gone to press too early for a story about a missing clerk in Ada. At police headquarters, Mike Baskin suggested that everyone go home; there was nothing more they could do tonight. The dispatcher would remain on duty, in case there was any news. The family, reluctant to leave, finally went out into the dark night air.

  Baskin went home to get some sleep. He was awakened about 2:30, again about 4, again about 6, by calls from the dispatcher, patching through calls from the family. No, there wasn’t any news, he told them. He would let them know of any news.

  He tossed in his bed, slept fitfully. Till at last dawn broke, an hour later, by man-made clocks, than it had the day before.

  The religion that pervades much of life in Ada is most visible on the streets on Sunday mornings: people walking to church, people driving to church, orange buses with the names of churches printed in black letters on the side carrying children to Sunday school. There are sections of Ada where there is a church on every corner. They are often used to give directions; to get to Tricia and Bud Wolf’s house, you go to the Nazarene Church and turn left. Downtown, the First Baptist Church and the First United Methodist Church are imposing edifices which, back to back, cover an entire city block. The First Christian Church, almost as large, to which Dr. and Mrs. Haraway belonged, is only a block away. Scattered through the town are scores of others: Faith Assembly of God, First Apostolic Church, First Assembly of God, Free Will Baptist, Fellowship Baptist, Unity Missionary Baptist, Philemon Baptist, Morris Memorial Baptist, Oak Avenue Baptist, Trinity Baptist, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, St. Luke’s Episcopal, St. Peter’s Episcopal, the Evangelistic Temple, First Lutheran Church, Church of the Nazarene, Calvary Pentecostal Holiness Church, First Pentecostal Holiness, Pentecostal Holiness, First Presbyterian (out on Kings Road), others. The lone Catholic church is on East Beverly. (Some Ada natives recall being brought up to believe that Catholic nuns ate children.) For many in the town, religion was the genuine cornerstone of their lives, enabling them to endure whatever fate had to offer; in restaurants and coffeeshops, as well as in private, these people often talked about Jesus reverently but familiarly, as if He lived next door. For others, as for some churchgoers everywhere, the religion was hypocritical. “The thing I can’t stand is how they hide behind the Bible around here,” said one rancher, who found it more useful to feed his horses that morning than to go to church. “They go to church on Sunday, but they’ll cut your throat for a two-dollar bill on Monday.”

  For Bud and Tricia Wolf, churchgoing was as life-sustaining as eating. Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings and Wednesday evenings as well they went to the Unity Missionary Baptist Church, a pale frame building on Seventh Street; during Bible Study Week they helped to teach the classes; every summer they spent a week in Arkansas at Vacation Bible Camp. On this particular Sunday they got the kids dressed in their best church outfits, took their Bibles, climbed into the family car, a dark green 1972 Pontiac with a faded bumper sticker that said, “Life Is Fragile, Handle With Prayer,” and they drove to church. They were surprised to see how many cars were already in the parking lot. They were even more surprised when they stepped inside and found the service already in progress, Sunday school already over. As dozens of pairs of eyes turned to look at them, Tricia flushed a deep red, understood what had happened, knew that everyone who was looking at them knew what had happened. She slunk into a pew with embarrassment. They had forgotten to turn their clocks ahead; they were an hour late.

  On the other side of town, Detective Captain Dennis Smith did not go to church that morning. He rarely went anymore, rarely felt guilty about it. He and Sandi made their rounds delivering the Oklahoman. Then he went to headquarters, to see about the missing girl.

  Donna Denice Haraway was born Donna Denice Lyon on August 19, 1959, in Holdenville, Oklahoma, about twenty miles east of Ada. Her parents were Jimmy Charles Lyon, a truck driver, and Patricia Lyon. She had an older brother, Ron, and a younger sister, Janet. In her early years the family moved to Purcell, where she attended school. At Purcell High she was in the Pep Club and the National Honor Society. She wore her hair long and straight in those days, and had a serious demeanor. She was not a student leader; working after school at the Dairy Queen managed by her
mother, she did not have much time for extracurricular activities; she was also on the shy side.

  She graduated from Purcell High on May 17, 1977. In the school yearbook, Dragon, where the pictures of the most popular girls appeared six or seven times, hers appears only twice—once with the Pep Club, once with the senior class. Her name is spelled Denice in one caption—which is correct—and Denise in the other.

  Upon graduation she was accepted at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. She attended for one semester, working after classes to pay her way. But the expense was too much. She moved back home and went to work to save up money for college. She attended Seminole Junior College for a time. When Janet graduated from high school in 1979, the family moved to Ada, where their mother became manager of Love’s Country Store on Mississippi. Denice went to work for her mother, and began taking classes at East Central. When her mother moved back to the Purcell area, Denice got a job at Wall’s Bargain Center on Main Street, a discount clothing store. She and Janet shared an apartment. When her job at Wall’s began to conflict with her class schedule, she quit and got a job at McAnally’s, where her schedule could be more flexible.