The Dreams of Ada Read Free Page B

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