The Dreams of Ada (2 page)

Other people could hear it, too. Many Ada residents have scanners in their homes. They can be useful in times of emergency—to keep track of tornado warnings in the area. They can also be cheap entertainment on a quiet evening if there is nothing good on television.

When he’d sent out the description, Sergeant Phillips went to look for the clerk. He saw a car, a 1969 Pontiac Sunbird, parked beside the building. There was no one in it. He checked the bathrooms and the cooler. There was no one in them. In the store he talked again with Whelchel, who told him of the couple they’d seen. Phillips picked up the brown purse behind the counter, looked inside it. He pulled out a driver’s license. It had a picture on it, of an attractive young woman with dark blond hair. At first, sitting in his pickup truck watching the couple leave, Gene Whelchel had not made a connection. Now, knowing the clerk was missing, he did. He lived out this way; he used to stop in the store fairly often, would chat sometimes with the clerk while making his purchases. The woman they’d seen leaving, he told Phillips, was the clerk.

The name on the driver’s license was Donna Denice Haraway.

Sergeant Phillips returned to the squad car. He sent out her name and description. The store manager, Monroe Atkeson, who lived nearby, was called. He arrived in a few minutes. He was told what had transpired by Phillips and by Whelchel, whom he knew slightly; they had gone to school together.

Atkeson locked the front door, closing the store for the evening, though closing time on Saturdays was eleven. He checked the tape on the cash register, and counted up the money on hand. There was $500 in a locked safe. There was $400 under the counter, ready to be put in the safe. There was $150 under the cash drawer. He estimated from the tape that the amount of money missing from the bill slots in the drawer was $167. The last item rung up on the tape was for 75 cents. His best guess was that that was for the can of beer now sitting open on the counter.

As the men waited for a detective to arrive, the manager put the money away, closed the cash register. He tossed the beer can into the trash. He emptied the ashtray with a single butt in it, so the store would be clean and ready for business when it opened the following morning.

Nobody stopped him. Nobody gave a thought to fingerprints.

Marie Titsworth is a small, dark, gentle Indian woman, who makes her living cleaning houses for people in Ada. Once a part of Indian Territory, the Ada area is home to a large number of Indians. The Chickasaw Nation headquarters is in town, as is the Carl Albert Indian Hospital.

Two nights earlier, on April 26, Marie Titsworth had called the police to her home. Her son Odell had gotten drunk, was arguing with his girlfriend, and things were getting violent. She wanted both of them out of the house. Several uniformed officers responded. Odell refused to leave the house. He fought with the police when they tried to subdue him. This was not an unusual scene. Odell had four felony convictions, for burglary and assault. There was no love between Odell Titsworth and the Ada police department.

The officers wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Odell, on the ground, was still kicking, and an officer kicked back. Titsworth’s arm was broken. Finally subdued, he was taken in a squad car to the emergency room at Valley View Hospital, where his arm was set in a cast and put in a sling. It was a spiral fracture of the upper arm, very painful. The doctor told him he might have to sleep sitting up for a while.

Under the regulations of the Ada police department, a full written report must be filed on any incident in which someone is injured during a police action. This is to help with any charges the police might want to bring, and to defend the police against any possible lawsuits. On Friday night, Detective Mike Baskin, one of the four detectives on the thirty-three-man force, went to Valley View to interview the emergency room staffers who had treated Titsworth. But, having worked all night the night before, they were off duty; they would be back on Saturday night. So it was that Baskin, normally off on Saturdays, was working the evening of April 28. He drove to police headquarters, exchanged his own car for a squad car, and went to Valley View. When he got there, about 9
P.M
., he waited for a while. Then he was told that the staff was having a busy night, and was asked if he could come back later. He said he could. He was on his way back to headquarters when the news of the robbery at McAnally’s, and of Donna Denice Haraway’s possible abduction, crackled over the police radio. Mike Baskin drove to the scene.

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.