by Robert Mayer
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.”
The truth was somewhere in between. Steve Haraway had taken his final exams, had graduated from East Central. He had taken a job as a salesman with a dental pharmaceutical firm that was based in New Jersey. He still lived in the apartment, but five days a week he was out of town, traveling across Oklahoma, selling pharmaceuticals. On weekends he would return, visit with his family, visit with his friends. Some of the time he would sit alone in the apartment. Most of Denice’s belongings still were there.
Alone in his cell, Tommy Ward, too, was thinking of a woman: of Lisa Lawson, the only girl he had loved.
As a teenager he had been shy with girls, had been teased by his friends because of it. He described his first relationships in the long essay he had written for Don Wyatt. He began the passage with a paragraph about his father:
My dad was a good man. He wouldnt let me go some of the places I wanted to go. But it was for my owne safty. He would tell me about the good things and the bad things about the world. I never got to come into town much. The only time I got to come into town was to go to church or to go to the store with him or mom. Sometimes I would sneak off and go over to one of my friends house across the highway. He always knew were to find me and he would punnish me for not telling where I was going. But I knew it was right for disobaying him.
So then time passed and I was learning more about the good and of the evel. And I alwase made shure I was doing good and staying in the house of the lord. Then people at school thought there was something wrong with me cause I never taken out a girl on a date. They would laugh and say he’s almost 16 years old and never taken out a girl. I told them I didnt care what they thought. That when I meat a girl I want to make shure she is the right one for me. And at the time I didn’t care to much about trying to find a girl. But there was a girl I thought was really nice to me and all. So one day I thought I would show them that I will go out with a girl. So I ask this girl if she would go out with me. She said, shure were will we go. I ask her if she would go to church with me. She started laughing at me. I ask her what was wrong. She thought I was crazy. She told me there was no lord or there was no God or no heven. We sit down and I talked to her about there was a lord and God and a heven. And I talked to her and tryed to get her to believe me. She still thought I was crazy. So then I didn’t talk to her much after that day. I went to church and ask the lord to forgive her and that some day she would see that there is a lord and God and a heven.
A year passed after that without Tommy dating. His father became ill, had several operations, was sent home to die. Tommy wrote:
I quit school and got a job at Evergreen Feeds. Then I quit going to church and started running around with the wrong people. I didn’t care about nothing. The truck drivers would come in and give me pills to take. I was working midnight to 8 oclock shift. Then I started smoking pot and staying out late and drinking and I didn’t care about myself. Then one night my boss fired me. Cause I came to work drunk and I was late. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was do all these bad things. I met a girl and all I thought about her was to go jump in bed with her. I didn’t love her. Then she broke up with me. Then I started loosing my friends. And started running around with bad ones.
Then one day mom ask me to go to church with her so I did. I went up and ask the lord to forgive me for the foolish ways I been acting. I was loosing my friends and I lost my girlfriend and I ask the lord to forgive me. And he did. I started getting back my friends. And if anyone was in need of help I would help them out the best way I could.
Then time passed and I met lisa lawson. I was madley in love. I would do anything I could for her. She changed my life completly. I caird more about her than I ever cared about a girl. Then she was at me to get a job.
Tommy got a job with his brother Jimmy, in Odessa, Texas. He ran up large phone bills calling Lisa. He was fired and came back to Ada.
I was so happy to see lisa and be back with her. Then one day we broke up. I felt like the world had ended for me. She thought when I was in Texas that I was seeing another girl. Then a cupple weeks later we seen each other and we talked. Then I was happy to get her back. Then we started going to church with her grandpa and sometimes with my mom.
After a time, Lisa enrolled in Seminole Junior College, thirty miles away.
I would go up to the school with her and sit in the car all day till she got out of classes. Then one day she got a apt. So I moved in with her and went out looking for a job. I couldn’t find one up there nowere. So then I came back to Ada and started looking for a job. lisa was mad at me for comming back to Ada. She thought that I came back to run around. So then she broke up with me.
Lisa began dating other people. Tommy kept trying to win her back. Lisa kept refusing.
One day when I was walking into town I seen lisa go by. I waved at her and she stoped. I started crying and I ask her to come back to me and she said no.
Tommy kept trying. He heard Lisa was dating a guy he knew named Ronnie Smith. He was very upset by this. He quarreled with Ronnie about her.
Then I apolijized for the way I was acting and told them I was sarry. That I still loved lisa and changed my ways and started back to church. Until I got the job in Norman. Cause I had to work 7 days a week. Then lisa assepted my polligy and I went back to Norman. Then this happened. I was writing a letter to her telling her that I was sorry for the ways I was acting. And I told her that I was leven it up to the lord if he ment for us to get back together he would see us back. Then I was writing to her about this. About Mr Smith questioniong me. And I told her that I was going to take a pollygraph test to prove my innicents. Then I wrote I will let you know what happens after I took the test. I didn’t ever get to finnish the letter cause this happend.
That had been five months before. In jail he had tried to forget her. But now, with spring coming, though there were no seasons inside, he was thinking again of Lisa. He wrote her a letter, enclosed it in a note he sent to Tricia, asking her to see that Lisa got it.
The letter to Lisa wasn’t sealed. Tricia read it. In the note, Tommy told Lisa how much he had been thinking of her
of late, how his life had changed, how he was a different person now, how he had gotten a new outlook in jail. He wrote that when he got out he wanted to make something of himself. He was sure he was going to get out of this mess soon. He was hoping that when he got out, Lisa would want to share his life.
Tricia did not know what to do with the note. There was a problem with giving it to Lisa. Lisa had gotten married two months before. Her name now was Lisa Lawson Smith.
Tricia and Miz Ward had decided, when Lisa got married, not to tell Tommy.
On the first day of spring, the Ada Rotary Club held its annual fund-raising pancake fry at the firehouse. The men and women of Ada began lining up at six in the morning to eat their breakfasts in the firehouse, and would continue to arrive until seven in the evening for their lunches, their dinners, their suppers. For three dollars each they ate and drank their fill of pancakes, bacon, sausage, coffee, three flavors of punch. The money raised would be used to support the Rotary Club’s civic projects.
The members of the Rotary Club—businessmen and professional men of all descriptions—wore pink aprons and white paper caps. Though it was a Wednesday, a workday, they each were donating all or part of their day. Some stood behind large grills, mixing batter, pouring it onto the grills, turning the pancakes as they sputtered to the proper shade of golden brown. Others stood behind long tables that held warmers filled with bacon and sausage. Still others stood by large coffee urns, filling paper cups. Behind a table near the pancake makers, handing out packets of butter, dressed like the others in apron and paper cap, was Dr. Jack Haraway, the dentist.
“Surely you can use three of these,” he said to a weather-beaten, wiry man moving past him, his plate laden with pancakes. The dentist held out his manicured hand. The man took the three packets of butter and moved on. There was no exchange of words between them. The man with the pancakes picked up a paper cup of coffee with his free hand and moved among the long tables that had been set up in the firehouse for the occasion—the fire trucks were parked on Twelfth Street, around the corner—until he found an empty seat. He sat and poured maple syrup onto his pancakes from one of the bottles that dotted the tables, and he began to eat.