DREAMS OF ADA, THE(ISBN=9780767926898) 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子版 mobi 在线

　　The true, bewildering story of a young woman’s

disappearance, the nightmare of a small town obsessed with

delivering justice, and the bizarre dream of a poor, uneducated man

accused of murder—a case that chillingly parallels the one,

occurring in the very same town, chronicled by John Grisham in

The Innocent Man.

On April 28, 1984, Denice Haraway disappeared from her job at a

convenience store on the outskirts of Ada, Oklahoma, and the sleepy

town erupted. Tales spread of rape, mutilation, and murder, and the

police set out on a relentless mission to bring someone to justice.

Six months later, two local men—Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot—were

arrested and brought to trial, even though they repudiated their

“confessions,” no body had been found, no weapon had been produced,

and no eyewitnesses had come forward. The Dreams of Ada is a

story of politics and morality, of fear and obsession. It is also a

moving, compelling portrait of one small town living through a

nightmare.

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　　1

　　DISAPPEARANCE

　　Half a block from Main Street in Ada, Oklahoma, less than fifty

yards from the railroad tracks, stands a small white building that

looks like a garage. Beside it on a metal pole is a black-and-white

wooden sign, the letters faded, that says: PECAN CRACKER. Ada is,

among other things, pecan country; on the outskirts are commercial

pecan orchards; in the grassy yards of many houses are one or more

pecan trees. In the fall, when the pecans are ripe, the adults

knock them off the trees with long poles. The children gather the

fallen ones from the ground. The nuts not intended for commercial

use are taken to the pecan cracker. There, in the small white

building, the pecans are dumped into the funnel-like tops of

machines.

　　One by one the hard pecans fall into moving gears. The top set of

gears cracks open the largest pecans. Smaller pecans fall through,

untouched, to another set of gears. These mesh closer and crack

apart the smaller pecans. Still some escape and fall again: to

another set of gears. These gears mesh tighter still; like steel

claws they crack apart even the smallest pecans. Few pecans are too

small, few shells too hard, to be cracked and broken, and to tumble

in pieces into unmarked paper sacks.

　　Ada (pronounced Aid-a) is a city of about 17,000 people, the

county seat of Pontotoc County, ninety miles southeast of Oklahoma

City. Well-known to crossword-puzzle addicts (“city in Oklahoma,

three letters”), it was named after a dark-haired girl, Ada Reed,

daughter of the town's founder, back when Oklahoma was Indian

Territory. In a rural area of farms, rolling hills, thick

woodlands, it is a small industrial hub.

　　This is quarter-horse country, where horses bred for quick bursts

of speed are sold at periodic auctions. It is oil country, with

scores of pumps grazing like metal horses in every direction. Oil

money built most of the magnificent mansions on upper-crust Kings

Road. It is also a factory town. The gray turrets of the Evergreen

feed mill tower only a block from Main Street like the

superstructure of a battleship. The Brockway factory, a few blocks

away, forges 1.3 million bottles and jars a day for Coke, Pepsi,

and Gerber Baby Foods, among others. Blue Bell jeans employs 175

local women to sew 45,000 pairs of Wranglers and Rustlers a week.

Ideal cement is produced in the town, as are Solo plastic cups. The

Burlington Northern Railroad track slices diagonally across Main

Street, several freights a day shrieking to a halt in the innards

of the feed mill.

　　Main Street dead-ends into East Central University, which makes

Ada the modest cultural hub of the area. But Ada is perhaps most of

all a religious town, mainly Baptist, where you can’t buy a mixed

drink without an annual “club” membership. There are fifty churches

in the town (forty-nine Protestant, one Catholic) and four movie

screens.

　　On Saturday night, April 28, 1984, a few minutes after 8:30, just

a few hours before the town would spring its clocks forward to

daylight saving time, a car and a pickup truck pulled into the

parking lot of McAnally’s, a convenience store that stands almost

alone out on the highway at the eastern end of town. The car was

being driven by Lenny Timmons, twenty-five years old, an X-ray

technician. Beside him was his brother David, seventeen, a high

school student. Both lived in Moore, Oklahoma, ninety miles away.

Driving the pickup truck that pulled in with them was their uncle,

Gene Whelchel, who lived just east of Ada, in a village called Love

Lady. They were planning to play poker that evening, and they

needed some change.

　　Lenny Timmons cut the engine and the lights of his car. Gene

Whelchel did the same in his pickup. The night was dark already;

the area around the two gas pumps in front of the store was

illuminated by fluorescent lights. So, too, was the inside of the

store, which they could see through the glass double doors, and

through a plate-glass window. An old-model pickup truck was parked

crosswise in front of the store, near an ice machine.

　　Lenny Timmons, tall and slim, with a neatly trimmed dark beard,

got out of the car and walked toward the store. His brother

remained in the car. Gene Whelchel, in his truck, puffed on a

cigarette. As Timmons entered the store, he passed in the double

doorway a young couple, who were leaving. The woman came out first,

the man right behind her.

　　David Timmons, waiting in the car, saw the couple emerge from the

store and walk toward the pickup. He noticed the man’s arm around

the woman's waist. Gene Whelchel also glanced their way. They

seemed to him like a pair of young lovers. The couple walked to the

passenger side of the truck. The young man opened the door. The

woman climbed in, and then the man beside her. After a few seconds

the engine started, and the pickup drove off. Gene Whelchel puffed

on his cigarette. David Timmons waited.

　　The inside of the store was bright to his eyes as Lenny Timmons

entered. The shelves, lined up parallel to the entrance, were

stacked with candy bars, paper products, cold remedies, tampons. In

the glass-enclosed refrigerators were milk, soda pop, juice.

Timmons, needing only change, saw the cash register and the

checkout counter to his left. He approached the counter and waited

for the clerk. There was none in sight. As he waited, he noticed,

idly, an open beer can on the counter, a cigarette burning in an

ashtray. Behind the counter he could see an open school book, a

brown handbag.

　　A minute passed, perhaps two. The clerk did not appear. Timmons

glanced impatiently among the rows of shelves. Perhaps the clerk

was in the beer cooler, he thought, or in the rest room. He

waited.

　　Growing more impatient, he went to the front door and opened and

closed it several times. Each time he opened it a buzzer went off,

a signal to the clerk on duty that someone had entered the store.

There was no response.

　　He looked behind the counter. The drawer of the cash register was

open. The money slots were empty, except for some coins.

　　Gene Whelchel looked at his watch. It was 8:40. He wondered what

was taking Lenny so long. Then Timmons hurried out of the store,

approached the pickup. He told his uncle, then his brother, that

something was wrong. The three of them entered the store. They

looked around, checked the walk-in cooler, the bathrooms. They

could find no clerk. They were careful not to touch anything. There

was a telephone on a wall of the store. They called the

police.

　　Ada police headquarters is in the City Hall, a modern one-story

brick building with basement offices, on Townsend Street. A young

officer, Kyle Gibbs, was manning the dispatch unit that night. He

took the call about a robbery at McAnally’s, jotted down the

information. One of the officers on patrol duty was Sergeant Harvey

Phillips, a tall, dark-haired, rugged-looking cop, fifteen years on

the force. Gibbs dispatched Sergeant Phillips to what he assumed

was the scene of the reported robbery—the McAnally's convenience

store out on North Broadway, at the sparsely populated northern

edge of town. Sergeant Phillips folded his long frame into a squad

car, pistol secure in the holster on his hip, and headed out that

way, crossing Main, passing the looming gray feed mill with a red

warning light at its highest point, bumping over the railroad

tracks as he did, passing the stores on Broadway, closed for the

evening, crossing Fourth Street, speeding north toward where

Broadway becomes one of the highways into town. Toward

McAnally’s.

　　Moments after Sergeant Phillips sped away, Kyle Gibbs had second

thoughts. McAnally’s is a small chain of convenience stores in the

region. There are three in Ada: one out on North Broadway, one out

on East Arlington, one close to downtown at Fourteenth and

Mississippi. The caller hadn't said which one he was calling from.

Gibbs telephoned the store on North Broadway, to make sure he had

sent the patrol car to the right place.

　　No, the clerk at North Broadway said. There had been no robbery

there. No trouble at all.

　　The dispatcher hung up. The robbery wouldn't have been downtown.

The caller had said something about a highway. Gibbs radioed new

instructions to Sergeant Phillips, who was just reaching Richardson

Loop and North Broadway. Phillips swung the squad car around,

headed east instead of north. He reached the scene of the

robbery—the McAnally's out on East Arlington Boulevard—about ten

minutes after leaving headquarters, about twice the time a direct

route would have taken.

　　In a suburban-style house seven miles south of town, surrounded

by two acres of lawn and a swimming pool, Detective Captain Dennis

Smith of the Ada police force was at home with his wife, Sandi.

They were planning to go to bed early, because they had to get up

early the next morning. Though a veteran of eighteen years on the

police force, the detective supplemented his income with a paper

route. Every morning, seven days a week, he and Sandi, who worked

as a building inspector for the city, started their day by driving

around town delivering 650 copies of the Daily Oklahoman, out of

Oklahoma City, the largest newspaper in the state. Sandi would

drive the family car while the detective, a stocky, sturdily built

man, bald almost in the manner of television's Kojak, hurled the

rolled-up newspapers onto the lawns of subscribers. Getting up

early wasn’t fun; tonight, because the clocks would be moved

forward, they would get even less sleep than usual.

　　Tricia Wolf was at home that night, with her husband, Bud, and

their three young children, in a graying frame house at 804 West

Ninth Street, in a working-class section of town. After supper they

watched television in the small, veneer-paneled living room

dominated by a four-foot-high oil painting of Jesus; the painting

had been done by Bud’s father, C. L. Wolf, an electrician and

amateur artist; it was one of their proudest possessions. The

children—Rhonda, nine; Buddy, six; and Laura Sue,

five&...

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媒体评论

　　“A work of quiet brilliance . . . Like Capote and Mailer

before him, Mayer compiles his details with a reporter’s skill and

arranges them with a novelist’s arrogance.”

　　—

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

　　“Ranks with the best . . . Clearly, thoroughly, and deftly

written.” —

Santa Fe Reporter

　　“A compelling, marvelously detailed picture of justice in a

small, scared town.” —

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