American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  In truth, the arrangement delighted him. He’d always wished he could be a full-time parent to his own daughter, and he liked being around kids again. Tonya was close with her boys—homemade lunches, cupcakes for school fund-raisers—but Charlie’s and Tonya’s lives weren’t all domestic: they still went out, and she still looked good and wanted him to look good, helping him pick out clothing that would coordinate with hers. “But not better than me,” she would tease.

  Eventually, he moved in with her and the boys. The location and the relationship kept him too busy to volunteer with Tasley anymore. They merged their social media accounts into one on Facebook—“TeeChar,” an amalgamation of their names—and a picture of the two of them, Charlie smiling at the camera and Tonya kissing his cheek.

  Tonya posted more often, but sometimes using the same account, Charlie would post a response, differentiating his own messages by specifying, “It’s Char.”

  “Having teriyaki chicken and veggies straight from the oven for dinna,” she wrote.

  “It’s Char. You make the best teriyaki chicken I have ever tasted yumyumyum.”

  Tonya was something of a poet and developed a near-daily ritual of posting either rhymes or homespun aphorisms that she called “Tonya-isms,” as in, “A little Tonya-ism to brighten your day.”

  “Tonya-ism,” she posted one day. “everywhere i go i try to make someone laugh . . . walmart is a good place to do this . . . also mcdonalds drive thru . . . i feel if i made someone laugh for a minute or forget their problems . . . i did a good deed . . . it does work u shud try it sometime.”

  “It’s Char,” he posted in response. “A lot of times when I’m stressed or just had a bad day, Tee takes me to Walmart and just does some of the craziest things and most of the time it makes me forget the stresses and worries of life.”

  That was the thing about Tonya. To Charlie, she could make anything interesting. They’d go to the children’s department and play with the toys, or she’d open the tester nail polish bottles in the makeup aisle and paint each fingernail with a different color. Or, knowing how much he appreciated her posterior, she would walk a few paces ahead of him and wiggle. Sometimes it was as simple as that.

  Her Tonya-isms were sometimes poems, silly or cheekily dirty.

  “i love to feel the cold air . . . blowin thru my hair,” she wrote in preparation for a coming rainstorm. “lazy day of hoverin . . . underneath the coverin.”

  A few days later the storm arrived: “its raining its pouring . . . the old lady ben out whoring . . . she dribblin done her chin . . . wonder where dat mouth been . . . she skirt is torn . . . she lookin real wore . . . he tapped that ass . . . she probaly got gas . . . poor ole soul ben freaked in da hole . . . she cant sit down . . . she look like a clown.”

  “You are very talented with words,” a friend responded.

  WHEN THEY MET, Tonya was still working as a nursing assistant and Charlie out of his stepdad’s shop. Several months into their relationship, though, George told him he thought it was time for Charlie to strike out on his own. Charlie would keep the customers that he’d accrued, but start working out of a different shop. He wondered if the separation was a test. George was getting older—if Charlie could successfully run his own outpost for a couple of years, then maybe George would retire and leave the big business to him.

  So Charlie did move out, but not very far. He took over the lease on a building just across the street, the old post office, and turned it into his own body shop. The space meant for the manager’s office was bigger than anything Charlie could imagine needing for himself, so he suggested that Tonya, who had recently decided to leave her nursing job, take it over and come up with a business for herself. She seemed to love the idea. After a while, she came up with a plan to open a kind of clothing boutique. Going-out clothes, she told people, at inexpensive prices. She said she thought a store like that would really flourish on the shore, as there weren’t any other places to buy the sorts of club attire she had in mind. Charlie hung some drywall and built a little hallway to separate his repair business from her store. When the first shipment of clothing came in from the wholesale vendor, Charlie remembered, they laid them all out for display and then laughed that they hadn’t ordered nearly enough merchandise. What had seemed like a big shipment barely covered the racks and tables she’d spread through the room. But they were still learning how to run businesses and they could both grow, they decided, so they went ahead and had a sign painted. On top, “Charlie’s,” and beneath, “A Tiny Taste of Toot,” after the nickname Tonya’s father used to call her.

  “Lilac bling dress size medium $19,” she wrote on the Facebook page she created for the store, above a strapless purple dress with silver sequins embellishing the bust. “Perfect for Easter.”

  She posted pictures of white platform pleather boots, gold-studded backpacks, tank tops with the Playboy bunny insignia, Apple Bottom dresses, designer or knockoff handbags: “Prada. Baby blue. They don’t last long when in stock.”

  The name was a little confusing to people. Some people thought it sounded more like a children’s store. The name actually caused a rift between Charlie and the mother of his daughter, who wondered if “toot” was a reference that meant Charlie was using again. But some people liked having a little spot to go to. It was nice to have an open business in the otherwise barren downtown of Tasley. Ever since the general store had closed, the only places to buy anything were Charlie’s stepdad’s shop, where you could get a quart of motor oil, or the vending machines alongside the fire station, where neighbors would walk to buy a can of Pepsi.

  Charlie worked on cars in the back, and Tonya sold clothes in the front, and occasionally Charlie would wander in while customers were browsing the racks—it was a tiny little place, only room for a few people at once—and she would have to explain that women didn’t like looking at clothes near a man in greasy coveralls. She would hold little promos sometimes—bring a bag of hard candy to feed her sweet tooth, get a free piece of jewelry.

  They dressed up for Easter, in bunny costumes for a children’s party. They dressed up for Halloween, he as a zombie and she as a vampire. For this occasion, she composed and posted on Facebook a special edition of a Tonya-ism: “Char has a date . . . he won’t be late . . . I might put him on my plate . . . he might get ate . . . I lookin’ for fresh meat . . . like a dog in heat . . . like a dog and a bone . . . a kid with a cone . . . I’m going to the dark side . . . wonder if he can handle the ride . . .”

  “LOL, it’s Char,” Charlie wrote in response. “I’m hanging on for dear life with this ride.”

  People had been surprised by their relationship at first. Perhaps because Tonya’s kids’ father was black, people assumed that she was only interested in dating black men. And yet here she was with doughy, bashful Charlie Applegate, whiter than white, and she seemed happy about the relationship. The couple snuggled in bed and drank root beers, or took late night drives to McDonalds for coffee, or grilled burgers outside, or attended to their pets, which had grown to include not only dogs but also chickens and pigs and goats that lived in a pen in the backyard. With Charlie’s acquiescence, they repainted the bedroom in girlish pinks and purples—a gesture that, to those who knew them, seemed both sweet and a little nutty, the idea of adults wanting to live in a Hello Kitty color palette.

  “Some people think I have it all,” Tonya wrote on Facebook after they’d been together a little more than a year. “I own my own house, I own two vehicles, I have a farmload of animals, I have two wonderful children, a wonderful man, a closet full of clothes, shoes, two businesses, health, and sanity.”

  And there it was, a parable of love in Accomack County, a modern romance of limited budgets and modest expectations and the simplest of pleasures. Still. In the middle of this domestic bliss, there were worries. There were parts of Tonya that Charlie felt he couldn’t access. She almost never talked about her childhood. When stories about her past would come out, they would do so in
pieces, halting. She told Charlie, as he remembered, that even those fragments were more than she’d ever shared with anyone else. She didn’t seem to want anyone else to know the parts of her that were soft or vulnerable. She got upset when the house wasn’t spotless, or when she wasn’t put together. He never saw her without makeup or styled hair. She almost never talked about how she felt, about anything, really. Charlie noticed there was a wall built around her and it bothered him.

  On the other hand, he was happy he’d been let in as far as he had. The quiet, mysterious hardness that surrounded Tonya—these things seemed like reasonable trade-offs, in order to be with a woman he’d once been too afraid to even talk to in a bar.

  One afternoon in late 2011, he suggested they meet for lunch. He took her to the Sage Diner, a place that served all-day breakfast but also proper entrees that came with a salad and dinner roll. He had words planned but couldn’t get them out; he kept having to excuse himself to walk around the parking lot until he could calm his nerves.

  “What have you got to say? I know you got to say something,” she said when he came back inside.

  He pulled out the silver ring he’d purchased from Walmart. “Will you marry me?”

  He’d planned to get down on one knee, but the restaurant was busier than he’d expected and he felt so awkward there in front of the other patrons that he ended up just passing the ring to her under the table.

  She said yes, but had an idea: Perhaps they should keep this development a secret. People might be jealous of their happiness. She wanted to let the idea of the engagement sit a while, and then redo it in a bigger way, later on.

  Charlie waited until her birthday and proposed again, this time at Shuckers, this time with a cake, borrowing the microphone from the evening’s band, who quieted everyone in the bar by saying, “We got an announcement.”

  People remembered that proposal. The way Charlie had stopped the band and gallantly said, “This is the first place I ever saw you in, so I decided this was the proper place to ask you to marry me. Ever since I met you, my life has changed. I’ve never loved any women but my daughter and my mother, but now I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  He got down on one knee, he took her left hand in both of his, he really did the whole thing up right, everyone thought so.

  At first Tonya shook her head like she was going to say no, but then she jumped up and down and said yes, as he knew she would. They’d coordinated everything for the night, including their yellow outfits to match the yellow cake that Charlie had arranged to be served upon her acceptance.

  The cake was a vertical affair. The top of it was a Barbie doll, waist up, as Charlie remembered. The bottom half was the cake part, a big billowing frosting-dress. Charlie and Tonya decided on it because Charlie sometimes told Tonya that with the way she always did up her hair and makeup, she looked just like a Barbie. She took it as the highest compliment.

  So now there they were, engaged.

  CHAPTER 10

  SCHRÖDINGER’S EVIDENCE

  SCOTT WADE PULLED HIS CAR onto Matthews Road. The state police special agent was one of several investigators and patrolmen who had been sent out to complete this particular task: canvas the area that profiler Isaac Van Patten had identified in his geographic profile of the arsonist’s likely home base. The circle encompassed the region just north and west of Parksley. Officers, some in teams, had spent several days canvassing those streets, going door to door, seeing if anybody had noticed anything suspicious about their friends or neighbors.

  The stretch that Wade had covered this day had already been impacted by the arsons. Just around the corner, the arsonist had burned down a shed belonging to a woman who’d relocated to the shore to move in with her ailing mother. All of her worldly possessions had been stored inside. When she first saw the light from the fire she assumed that her neighbor must have bought a flood light for security, that’s how bright the flames were. A little farther down on Matthews Road, an old truck was lit on fire. Shortly after that was the Gomez residence, where Lois and Miguel had plans to eventually rebuild their garage but hadn’t yet.

  The Gomez residence was the first house Wade knocked at where anyone was home. Later, he wouldn’t recall their names, but would remember them as the frightened older couple who, after the burning of their garage, kept a rifle leaning in the corner for safety.

  He left and headed next door. His second house that night belonged to Tonya Bundick. She spotted him coming across the yard and stepped out on her stoop to meet him. He thought she looked familiar and after a few seconds placed her: Christmas night at the Royal Farms, when he and Sheriff Todd Godwin had sat and chatted with Tonya and her boyfriend, and everyone had been glad there were no fires that night. Now he reintroduced himself and explained what he was out doing.

  She didn’t have anything to add, she told him. She mentioned a Facebook page that Accomack residents used to gossip and speculate over the arsons. She told Wade that if he wanted to know who was doing it, he should visit that page. She was pretty sure that whoever was doing the arsons was probably hanging out there.

  Wade moved on to the next house.

  THINGS THAT HAD BEEN TRIED, but hadn’t yet led anywhere, in the investigation of the arsons of Accomack County:

  Members of the drug task force were working their informants to see if they’d heard anyone with a big mouth bragging about the fires.

  Virginia fire marshal instructor Bobby Bailey’s cameras were still trained on the potential arson sites. They were special cameras. When they detected motion, they’d automatically text the photos to preprogrammed numbers. Bailey arranged for any captured images to be immediately sent to himself, Sheriff Godwin, and the investigators Neal and Barnes. On his own phone, he gave each location a different ringtone. If the camera labeled Cashville Road was triggered, he’d get a ding-dong, or if the camera from Groton Road was triggered, he’d get a woo-woo-woo, or a siren for Johnson Road. The roads were literally calling to him.

  The first night the cell phones went off, the four men grabbed them eagerly only to see a blurry picture of a squirrel crossing the field. The next time, it was a bird. One night they caught an image of a cat chasing a mouse. The symbolism in that seemed rich, but it didn’t bring them any closer to an investigative victory. One time, it was a fuzzy image of a hand that appeared to be reaching toward the camera. There was great excitement over this, but they didn’t know if it belonged to the arsonist or just a curious hiker.

  There were men in cars, a whole alphabet soup of men from the ATF and the FBI and the VSP, who patrolled every night within their assigned jurisdictions, burning rubber to get to the site of each fire as soon as the 911 call came in with the goal of one day getting there before the arsonist left.

  There was a man in an airplane, a sheriff’s deputy who got in a tiny Cessna flown by a state police pilot every night and soared up and down the length of the county, tailing cars that had been radioed in as suspicious, or just observing the streets where, from the air, streetlights cast a glow that was pale and yellow, and fires cast one that was deep amber. “On a clear night on the shore, you can see a long, long way,” he said.

  There were still the men in tents, freezing their butts off, arriving in rotating shipments from counties around the state who had loaned in personnel. These western Virginia mountain men or D.C.-area suburbanites would get debriefed on the Eastern Shore, be issued a tent, a heater, some night-vision goggles, and a radio, and would then be driven to their assigned abandoned house, where they would leap out of the car when nobody was looking and then lie in wait.

  And there was forensic evidence being collected, all the time. There was the set of two shoe prints that were discovered, to great fanfare, at a fire on Puncoteague Road, fire number fifty-two. The investigators celebrated, and marked the print by sticking little evidence flags into the ground in order to protect it until a stone cast could be made. There was a tire imprint at another.

  Ca
sts were made of the tire and the shoe prints. These casts were packaged up and sent to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science branch across the bay in Chesapeake, where forensic scientists tried to determine a match.

  The tire impression was determined to belong to “BFGoodrich or any other brand of tire with similar tread design,” according to the forensic report. This was less than helpful: Goodrich was one of the most common tire brands in the United States. The shoe print was determined to belong to “Nike, or any other brand of footwear with a similar outsole design.” This was less than helpful.

  Even if the forensic scientists had been able to identify the exact make and model of the exact shoe worn by the arsonist, Neal and Barnes found themselves wondering exactly where that would get them. So what if they had a perfect shoe print—were they going to obtain search warrants for the closets of every man in Accomack County? Require a shoes-off policy for all public spaces, so that each person’s footwear could be examined before they were allowed entry? Lacking a suspect to compare the prints to, the prints became essentially useless.

  The same was true for a wadded-up rag found at one scene:

  “No hairs suitable for nuclear DNA analysis were recovered,” read the forensic report.

  And another rag:

  “It is not suitable for PCR analysis and no further testing was conducted on this sample.”

  And another:

  “No DNA profile consistent with this profile was found.”

  The only other potential evidence that could be tested was what was drawn from the fire itself: the shards of wood debris that had been collected from each fire’s point of origin. Those shards might have remnants of the accelerant used to light the fires, which, if identified, could turn out to be clues.