The Dreams of Ada (21 page)

The defense called only one witness: Karen Wise. The attorneys asked her about the information Tricia had relayed to them from Vicki Jenkins. Ms. Wise said she had been receiving strange phone calls since she testified at the hearing, and that she had been frightened by a prowler lurking below her apartment, a tall man in blue jeans and boots, walking up and down in the alley. Mike Addicott asked if she had not told a friend the prowler looked like one of the men at J.P.’s the night of the disappearance. Ms. Wise replied that the man resembled the one who had been with Tommy Ward that night.

The testimony concluded. Defense attorneys requested a continuation of the hearing until OSBI agent Gary Rogers could be subpoenaed to testify; Rogers had not been present at any of the sessions, though officially he was the officer who had brought the charges; he was away in Houston attending a law-enforcement training program. Judge Miller denied the request, in the interest of a speedy trial, he said, and because witnesses to all events connected to the case and attended by Rogers had already been questioned.

The defense attorneys then argued their central motion: that all of the charges should be dismissed for lack of evidence.

Judge Miller did not adjourn the hearing to ponder its climactic decision. He was ready with his ruling. There was tension in the courtroom. The district attorney, the defense attorneys, the suspects, the spectators—all sat motionless.

On the rape charge, the judge sustained the objection of the defense attorneys. He ruled that no evidence had been introduced, beyond the statements of the defendants, proving rape. The rape charge was dismissed. He overruled the defense objections on the other three counts. He ordered that Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot be bound over for formal arraignment on charges of robbery with a dangerous weapon, of kidnapping, and of murder in the first degree.

Judge Miller set the formal arraignment for Ward for 9:45
A.M
. Monday, March 4—a month in the future—and Fontenot’s for March 5. At the arraignment they would be asked to plead to the charges against them.

Bill Peterson told the press after the hearing that he might appeal the dismissal of the rape charge.

Tricia and Bud and Miz Ward and the rest of Tommy’s family were distraught; they did not understand the logic of the judge’s ruling. “How can they bring charges of murder?” Tricia wanted to know once again. “They still ain’t found her body. They still don’t know for sure she’s daid.”

When Dennis Smith left the courthouse, he turned right, walked half a block, past the county jail, crossed Townsend Street, and entered City Hall. Police headquarters occupied the rear of the building and the basement; his office was downstairs. The entrance to City Hall was a double glass door. Scotch-taped inside the door on the left was a Xeroxed flyer, 8½ inches by 14 inches. Near the top of the flyer was the yearbook photograph of Donna Denice Haraway, and beside it her description; below it were the composite drawings of the two suspects Karen Wise had seen at J.P.’s. The flyer requested any information about the young woman’s disappearance.

It had been pasted to the door for more than nine months. Smith made no move to take it down now.

In Tulsa on Saturday night, Joel Ward was awakened once again by a late-night call. It was the third such call in six weeks, on alternate Saturdays. The man’s voice was the same as before; his message was more explicit this time. He didn’t warn Joel to stop helping defend Tommy “or else.” He warned that if he didn’t stop helping Tommy, then the entire Ward family would be killed.

Joel hung up the phone, frightened. He thought of his mother, in her sixties, who once had had heart trouble, soft-spoken, unschooled, out of her depth in the world of courtrooms and lawyers, as were they all; of Tricia and the kids, Rhonda and Buddy and Laura Sue, so vulnerable in their school playgrounds or anywhere; of Kay, sweet and pretty now at eighteen; of all the others. He didn’t know what to do about the threat.

He had been brought up to believe that in times of trouble you went to the police. He didn’t dare do that now. He was afraid the caller
was
the police.

If there was any connection between the frightening calls to Karen Wise and to Joel Ward, no one was making it.

8

ANNIVERSARY

T
he Evergreen feed mill, towering as it does a block from the center of town, is the symbolic throbbing heart of Ada; the railroad track is its aorta. Carried in on the shuddering trains are corn, wheat, oats, and barley grown in near and distant countrysides; carried out by the trains in fifty-pound sacks are assorted feed mixtures for horses, cattle, pigs. With 120 employees during peak production, the mill is not the largest employer in town; Valley View Hospital employs more; so do Brockway, Solo Cup, Ideal Cement, and the J. P. Emco Company, maker of molded rubber parts for automobiles. But because of seasonal layoffs and hirings—production of feed is high in the autumn and winter, drops off in spring and summer when pastureland is abundant—more of the people of Ada have probably worked at the mill at some point in their lives than anywhere else.

When Tommy Ward’s father died in 1979, Tommy quit school and got a job at the mill. He had two conflicting needs at the time. One was to work, to help support himself and his family; the other was to fill the emptiness caused by his father’s death; he did this with drinking, dope, carousing. The needs were incompatible; he was fired after three weeks when he showed up for work drunk. During that brief stay at the mill, Tommy recommended his brother-in-law, Bud, for work. Bud was hired as a loader, hauling the fifty-pound sacks onto the trains. He quickly advanced to mixer, operating a computer that mixed the various feeds in the proper proportions. Highly thought of, Bud was still at the mill six years later, supporting Tricia, the kids, and the foster kids.

Another who worked at the mill was a man named Donnie Meyers. Not long before Denice Haraway vanished, Donnie Meyers had disappeared, inside the mill, while on duty there; his work station was vacant. For six hours the mill was searched; Donnie could not be found. Then the feed that was being drawn out of a huge, sixty-foot-high tank stopped coming out. The foreman immediately said, “That’s where he is! He’s in that tank!” Workers climbed to the highest rafters of the mill and looked down into the tank. They saw a hardhat on top of the mound of grain. Donnie Meyers had fallen about forty feet, into eighteen feet of feed. He’d been sucked into the feed and had suffocated, his neck possibly broken in the fall. When they got him out, his face was black. At his funeral the casket was open. Some of his co-workers could recognize him only by a crooked finger that he had broken once.

Donnie Meyers had a sister who was a good friend of Tricia. The sister had worked for a few months, several years earlier, with Denice Haraway, at Love’s Country Store on Mississippi. She told Tricia one day about how Denice, a nice girl, had been madly in love with a man from Texas back then; about how surprised she had been when she heard that Denice had married Steve Haraway instead of the Texas man. “Maybe he came back for her,” she said. “Maybe he came back and they ran away together.”

For months afterward, Tricia clung to this hope: that the boyfriend from Texas had come back, that Denice had run away with him. “I know I’m clutching at straws,” Tricia would tell her friends. “But when your brother is in jail accused of murder, you clutch at straws.”

What Tricia did not know was that the day after Denice disappeared, the police asked her mother, Pat Virgin, for a list of Denice’s former boyfriends, who might have been jealous. The list was not long. Prominent on it was the man from Texas. The police asked the Texas Rangers to check him out; word came back that the man worked on oil rigs, that he had been working offshore the night Denice Haraway disappeared.

Tommy Ward was formally arraigned on the morning of March 4 on charges of robbery, kidnapping, and murder in the Haraway case.

At the same time, in the smaller courtroom at the opposite end of the hallway, another proceeding was taking place. A woman named Linda was seeking to regain custody of her two small children. Their names were David and Lisa; they were the foster kids in the home of Bud and Tricia Wolf.

In the larger courtroom, brought from the jail by sheriff’s deputies in his prison-white coveralls, Ward saw a new face behind the bench. The long, lean, moustached face of Judge Miller was gone; his role, under state law, had been completed when he ruled that the suspects should go to trial on three counts. In its place was the round, pink, clean-shaven face of Judge Ronald Jones; as district judge, it would be his assignment to conduct the arraignment, to rule on subsequent motions, and to preside at the trial itself.

Accompanied by attorney Mike Addicott of Wyatt & Addicott, Tommy Ward pleaded not guilty to all three counts.

Tommy’s family and the local press had expected that a trial date would then be set. But the defense attorneys had filed numerous motions in the case; Judge Jones set March 21 as the date on which these motions would be argued in court. Addicott told Ward’s family that a trial was not likely to take place until mid-summer; Tommy would have to remain in jail at least that long.

At the same time, in the smaller courtroom, another judge ruled that the young mother of David and Lisa had not shown sufficient reason why her children should be returned to her; she was told she could apply again in mid-July. In the corridor between the two courtrooms, the young woman approached Tricia; she knew who she was, had been allowed to see the children periodically; had seen for herself how well they were doing.

“I want to get my children back,” the woman told Tricia. “But if I can’t get them back, I hope you’ll keep them.”

Tricia was deeply moved.

The next day, Karl Fontenot pleaded not guilty to the identical charges of robbery, kidnapping, and murder. His attorney, George Butner, was granted five days to file additional motions in the case. Judge Jones asked if Fontenot understood that consideration of the motions would delay his trial; Butner said that he did. The judge set March 26 as the date for arguing these motions.

One of the motions filed by Wyatt & Addicott was to get Tommy Ward to a state hospital for psychiatric evaluation; the lawyer felt that a change of scenery, after four and a half months in solitary confinement, would do Tommy good. When Tommy heard of this motion, he telephoned Tricia from the jail.

“Is he sending me there so they’ll say I couldn’t have done it?” he asked. “Or does he want them to think I’m crazy? Because if he does, I can act crazy, all right. I can make them think I’m crazy.”

Tricia told him not to act crazy.

On Friday, March 15, Tommy Ward’s sister Joice gave birth to a son in Tulsa; it was her fourth child. The same afternoon, his baby sister, Kay, eighteen, gave birth to her first child, also a boy, in Ada. In the space of an hour, Tommy Ward, in his jail cell, became an uncle twice.

His sister Melva, in California, was expecting her fourth child around June 1. And Tricia, who had miscarried in December, had learned the week before that she was pregnant again. She and Bud, despite their tight financial situation, despite their unavoidable preoccupation with the plight of Tommy, had decided they wanted one more child; they were surprised she had gotten pregnant so quickly. Tricia immediately got off her feet, went “down,” as she called it, spent day after day sprawled on the living room sofa, resting, hoping that by remaining down during the early weeks of pregnancy she could overcome her history of miscarriages.

The night that Joice and Kay gave birth, Tricia had a dream. She dreamed that she was alone in a car parked near the old Ward house on Ashland Avenue, in which they all had grown up. She could not move the car, because a man was standing in front of it, pointing a gun at her; another man was in back of the car, also pointing a gun at her. One of the men was a neighbor, an old man, who had testified against Tommy at the preliminary hearing, saying he used to see Tommy riding around in a gray pickup; the other man was a leader of her church. In the dream the men had taken her children away from her.

“Why did you take my children?” Tricia asked. She was in a panic. “Why did you take my children? Why did you take my children?”

Her whimpering awakened Bud, asleep beside her. He propped himself up on an elbow and watched her twitching lips, and listened.

The next day, when Tricia related her dream, Bud told her what he had done.

“Why didn’t you wake me up!” Tricia demanded.

Bud said, “Because I wanted to find out why they took your children.”

The reason they had taken her children in the dream, Tricia said, was this: they had pointed guns at her, one from the front, one from the back, and said, “Because you killed Denice Haraway! Because you killed Denice Haraway!”

St. Patrick’s Day fell on Sunday. It was Bud and Tricia’s twelfth wedding anniversary. They made no special plans for the day. Tricia would remain beached on the sofa, trying to preserve the embryo growing inside her. It would be only the second Sunday she did not visit Tommy at the jail; the first had been the day of her miscarriage in December.

In the early afternoon, Bud went to the jail to visit. In the small visiting room Tommy seemed very nervous, his hands shaking while he talked and laughed. He said he had been praying a lot. He had started writing poetry to pass the time—religious poems, mostly. Some he had sent to Tricia. There were others, too, Tommy said, poems about the girls who had done him wrong.

He smiled when he said that.

The snaps of his white coveralls were open to the waist; Bud could see his smooth bare chest. He was wearing old cowboy boots, which he showed off proudly. The week before, his mother had brought him a new pair of tennis shoes, which is what he usually wore. But the jailers took away the laces, and he did not like the sneakers without laces; he had traded them to another inmate for the worn cowboy boots.

Mostly, Tommy told Bud, he just sits in his cell and twiddles his thumbs. And he demonstrated, twiddling his thumbs rapidly, first forward, then back.

“You’re getting pretty good at that,” Bud said.

Tommy laughed.

“The days are getting longer,” he said. “Longer and longer every day.”

He said he thought his trial date at last will be set on Thursday, after the lawyers argue the motions in the case.

When he returned to the house, Bud fixed lunch while Tricia remained on the sofa, beneath a light blanket. From time to time her muscles began to ache; carefully she swung her legs to the floor and walked three steps to an easy chair and sat there for a while. She thought back over the twelve years of her marriage: the three kids, eight foster kids in the last two years; she looked at Lisa, crawling about on the floor, smiling her chipmunk smile; Lisa was up to eighteen pounds, was doing fine.

She thought of Tommy.

Maxine had come by the day before to say happy anniversary, and had asked to see their wedding album. They had leafed through the dozen pages: the ceremony—how slim she was then—she and Bud stuffing their faces with wedding cake, a group shot of the groom and bride surrounded by all her brothers and sisters except Jimmy, who had been in the service. Tommy was in the center, neat in his blue suit; he was twelve then; he had been their ring bearer. Beside him was Kay, the flower girl, six years old; now she was eighteen, a mother for nearly twenty-four hours.

In mid-afternoon, Melva telephoned from California, to wish them a happy anniversary, and to find out how Tommy was doing. He was doing just fine, Tricia said. A few minutes later, as if the twins had a psychic connection, Melvin called from Virginia. She hadn’t heard from either in weeks. Melvin was not calling to wish them a happy anniversary; he had forgotten about that. He was calling to say the aircraft carrier he was assigned to, the U.S.S.
Coral Sea
, was shipping out in the morning; he would be out of touch for three weeks. But he was hoping for an early discharge, he told Tricia; he thought he might be back in Ada by May 1. He had applied for it because of Tommy’s situation.

“I’m gonna bring a bunch of big old Navy boys home,” Melvin said, “and straighten things out.”

When she handed the phone to one of the kids to hang up, Tricia recalled something Joel had said recently. “We were drifting apart,” he’d said, “but Tommy has drawn us together.”

And she recalled something Tommy had said: “When I got arrested, I thought all of you would hate me.”

The two-story building at the corner of Fourteenth and Rennie is ocher brick with red brick trim. There was an eerie poignancy about it as it was washed by the late afternoon sun. The entrance on the corner was marked 200 East Fourteenth. It was the dental office of Dr. Jack Haraway, Denice’s father-in-law, a member of the Rotary Club—“high society,” in the eyes of Tricia Wolf. The door behind it, 202, led to a stairway and the apartment in which Steve and Denice had lived. The curtains were drawn, seemed always to be drawn these days. There was no sign of life.

Tricia had heard that shortly after the disappearance, Steve Haraway had gone off to Dallas or somewhere, and never had returned. Dorothy Hogue, the reporter for the Ada
News
who was covering the case, believed something different. “I never heard he left town,” Ms. Hogue said. “I heard he just sits up there alone in that apartment, every day and every night. Just sits there, waitin’ for her to come back.”