American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  Godwin wanted to be ready, and he decided the first thing they needed was a list of potential targets—a way to understand the potential scope of the problem and what, exactly, they could be dealing with here. A request was put forth to a county department for an official roster of all of the abandoned houses on record in Accomack. While they waited for that, the sheriff’s deputies and state police investigators brainstormed on their own. It wasn’t difficult. Anyone who was from the shore could list those houses for days—they were places kids had told ghost stories about, and teenagers had thrown parties in, and adults had lobbied to either be torn down or returned to their former glory. Houses off Bayside Road. Houses off Seaside Road. The house on the road nobody knew the name of but that always had a goat tied up on the corner. Little shacks. Big shacks. Whispering Pines.

  A day or two later, the official list from the county came over. On it were eight hundred addresses. Eight hundred potential targets. To one investigator, that number seemed low: it included only residences that someone was still paying taxes on. It didn’t include the houses that were buried deep in the woods or marshland, covered in ivy—the houses that even the Born Heres could stumble upon, surprised. The real number, the investigator thought, was probably in the thousands.

  Godwin didn’t have thousands of deputies. He thought that, between his own staff and a few borrowed officers from local police departments, he could probably get eight or ten volunteers to keep an eye on a select group of houses. His staff and the Virginia State Police tried to take those eight hundred houses and whittle them down to a few logical guesses. To be candidates for arson, the houses needed to have easy access from the road. Whoever had lit the first fires had done so quickly enough that they’d cleared the area before being spotted. For the same reason, it made sense to focus on houses with multiple access points rather than ones on dead-end roads. The police and sheriff’s deputies made their list of houses to be watched: Bayside Road. Orchard Road. Rose Cottage Road. There was a house in Keller that they went back and forth on for a while. It fit all of the criteria. In the end, it was edged out—number six on the list, just below the cutoff. Not because it necessarily seemed worse or better than numbers one through five, but because they had to start somewhere.

  Godwin was a hunter, like a lot of men who spent time in the county, going all the way back to Grover Cleveland. It was hard to live here and avoid it: At twilight in these parts, groups of dozens of deer would appear on fields, grazing away at crops. Culling the herds was seen as something of a civic duty. Residents grew up doing it, most of them ate the meat they caught, and a lot of them did the butchering themselves. Here’s what deer hunters knew about catching their chosen prey: stalking was not the answer. Deer were too fast, too easily startled. They couldn’t be pursued. The way to catch a deer was to figure out where it already planned to go, and get there before it did. Choose a location that had the kind of things deer like to eat, in the kind of environment it likes to eat it in. Wait where the deer couldn’t see you. Be still. Be patient. And be certain in your convictions. If a deer didn’t show up the first time, come back to the same location again, and again, until it did.

  Godwin knew what kind of thing the arsonist liked. He liked abandoned houses. So maybe the thing to do was to find the most delectable abandoned houses in the county. And then wait.

  He gave one of his deputies a department credit card and told him to go to the nearest Bass Pro Outlet and buy out their stash of camouflage tents. Portable heaters, too. It was almost Thanksgiving, and the first frost had already descended.

  By November 18, while Rob Barnes and Glenn Neal continued doggedly investigating every fire scene, the sheriff had assembled five teams of men in tents. They got in place and they stayed in place, through fires seven, eight, and nine. They arrived before dusk, slinking through the woods when they were sure nobody was watching, and they stayed into the early hours of the morning, when the risk of another fire seemed to die down. They stayed in place while the local paper, the Eastern Shore News, ran its first article about the arsons, and then its second, with the headline, “Suspicious Fires Probed.” They stayed through fires ten, eleven, twelve. There was no overtime pay available, so they stayed in place with the promise of comped vacation days that they knew they’d never get around to using, through fires thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

  On the night of December 8, there was a fire at a commercial structure on Seaside Road. It was the one in Keller. Number six on the likely target list, the one they didn’t have the bodies to watch. It was the twenty-eighth fire.

  Godwin was furious. So were Barnes and Neal, who had been examining every single fire but had, as of yet, come up with nothing in terms of clues. It was the way of fires: evidence burned itself up. The firefighters, who had now been called out nearly every night for a month straight, were exhausted. They were also beginning to wonder if they were dealing with some kind of fucking criminal mastermind.

  CHAPTER 4

  CHARLIE

  CHARLIE SMITH’S LIFE had been a mess, though he was the first to admit it was mostly his own fault, which was one of the things people liked about him. He was perpetually screwing up, but then again, he was perpetually admitting it, too, infused with some kind of relentless honesty. His father had left when he was an infant, but people who had witnessed his parents’ marriage agreed that its dissolution might have been a boon for everyone. His mother had remarried a steady man named George Applegate, who treated his new stepchildren well enough that most people knew Charlie as Charlie Applegate and assumed that he was biologically George’s.

  The public assumptions didn’t register much to Charlie, thirty-eight, who still felt like he didn’t belong—not in his family, and not in society in general. He never stopped wondering why his dad had left, he never stopped worrying he wasn’t loved as much as the kids from his mother’s second marriage. He thought a lot about those things as a kid. It was hard for him to know whether the feelings would have gone away on their own, because by the time he was thirteen, he’d found a way to make them go away. A friend gave him some marijuana. He tried it and liked it because it made him laugh and laugh, and it also made him feel like he understood the jokes that seemed to go over his head the rest of the time.

  The first time Charlie tried to pass ninth grade, he was too stoned to put in much effort. The second time, he acted up and got kicked out. The third time, he went for “about a half an hour,” he estimated, before realizing he didn’t know why he was there at all and dropping out for good. He hated school. It didn’t come naturally to him and he had trouble imagining a future profession in which formal education was any kind of use.

  George fixed cars for a living and taught Charlie to do the same; by the time Charlie was eight, he was spending summers sanding imperfections out of the cars people brought into the family’s shop. There were official shop hours posted on the door, but those were guidelines: Cars were worked on until they were finished, and sometimes that meant dawn hours or evening hours, until the light above Eastern Shore Auto was the only one visible on the street. George also volunteered with the Tasley Fire Department, and he taught Charlie to do that, too.

  Charlie’s voice was on the slow side, his weight was on the roly-poly side, and when he got confused or embarrassed—or when he was amused or flustered or bored or sometimes for reasons even he wasn’t sure of—he would burst into a high-pitched giggle that he couldn’t control. He was of average height, 5 feet 8 inches, but seemed smaller due to a hunched, folded way of walking. He had close-cropped red hair and wide blue eyes. He was perpetually stoned and, as he got older and marijuana turned to crack, somewhat unpredictable. When people described him, they often swam around for a while in search of the right metaphor: “Not the sharpest crayon in the box.” “Not the brightest bulb in the lamp.” But even the people who thought he was lacking in book smarts would admit that Charlie knew how to do two things: fix cars and fight fires.

  God, could he fix ca
rs, especially the detail-oriented business that came with bodywork. While Charlie was still a teenager, people brought him fender benders, faded pickup trucks, or last-gasp rust heaps that owners were embarrassed to drive but not in a financial position to replace. Charlie, working out of his stepfather’s shop, would make them new again. He liked it, the immediacy of it, the fact that he could see what he’d accomplished and then get paid for it.

  And firefighting—he’d joined the Tasley crew as a junior member on his twelfth birthday. Pagers didn’t exist at that time; volunteers would know there was a fire because a big siren would go off from the middle of town. It went off three times on Charlie’s first day as a junior member, and Charlie would always remember how important and vital it felt, to pull up to the scene of a car accident in the fire engine and realize that he knew the injured man inside.

  The young volunteers who joined before their eighteenth birthdays got to leave school whenever they were called to a fire, and teachers couldn’t do anything about it. Which meant that in the 1980s in Accomack County, at least for the teenage set, being a firefighter was the closest thing to being a demigod.

  By the early 1990s, Charlie’s drug problem had escalated and begun to interfere with his dreams. He moved in with an uncle he didn’t like much, but who at least offered him a place to stay. He then began stealing from that uncle to pay for crack. His uncle looked the other way when Charlie stole a gun, a coin collection, a bicycle—but he couldn’t look the other way when Charlie stole his checkbook and began forging checks. They weren’t for big amounts, fifty or a hundred bucks each, but there were a lot of them. When Charlie was eventually caught, he was charged with three dozen counts of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison, with most of his time suspended. He got out, relapsed, got clean, relapsed again, and got involved with a robbery in which he and a guy whose last name he wasn’t exactly sure of broke into another guy’s house and stole a cordless drill, an air compressor, a propane torch, and a battery charger. Police caught him and brought him in for an interview, at which point he confessed. When asked whether there was anything else he wanted to add about the incident, instead of trying to explain away his actions or ask for some kind of deal, he helpfully explained, “The battery charger was for the cordless drill.” He went to prison again.

  Charlie’s probation officer, Roy Custis, dutifully relayed his charge’s continued struggles in a series of letters to the local Commonwealth’s attorney. Usually, Charlie was where Custis expected him to be for their regular check-ins—with his parents—but sometimes he wasn’t. Once, Charlie had disappeared for an extended period of time, then reappeared with bloodshot eyes and sallow skin, telling Custis he didn’t need to take a drug test because he’d rather just admit there was crack in his system.

  Custis couldn’t help but like Charlie, a sentiment that he realized was relative, considering that it mostly meant he liked Charlie more than the other criminals he was employed to spend time with. But he liked the whole Smith-Applegate family. Charlie’s mother, Brenda, was unfailingly supportive of her wayward son, and though Charlie’s stepfather didn’t seem to have quite the same warmth, Custis sensed that any sternness on George’s part had to do mostly with worry about Charlie falling off the wagon again. To Custis, Charlie was pleasant and polite. He seemed innocent. Not innocent in the legal sense, but innocent in a sort of guileless hopefulness. Custis hoped he needed just a few more years of growing up before he became a fully functioning member of society.

  After his first stint in prison, Charlie had a brief dalliance with an old friend that resulted in a baby girl. The pregnancy had been accidental, but his commitment to fatherhood was steadfast. He suggested marriage; the baby’s mother declined but told him he could be as involved in their daughter’s life as he liked. He never missed a hockey game or school recital, and volunteered to take his daughter to doctors’ appointments and playdates while her mother was at work.

  After his second stint in prison, a penitentiary in central Virginia, he went to look for a job at a poultry plant, and when he walked in the door he was spotted by a woman named Mary, who saw him, turned to her friend, and immediately said, “Oh my God, I’ll end up with him.” There was something about Charlie that Mary just liked. He seemed easygoing. What appealed to her most of all was the way he talked about missing his daughter, and how he wanted to be a good father to her. After he and Mary had been going out for a little while, she agreed to move back with him to Accomack so he could be closer to his child. Her own two children eventually joined them and they settled in a house that Charlie’s parents had rented for them just down the block from the fire station.

  He did good, they both did. Charlie went to AA meetings and NA meetings, and Mary got a settlement from a job injury that let them do up the kids’ birthdays in a big way, and gave her the money to enroll in EMT classes.

  And there was the fire department, the other hub in their lives. Despite his criminal record, the leadership of the Tasley department believed what his parole officer believed—that Charlie was a decent guy who was just a little lost. They allowed him back in the department, where his stepfather and half brother, Bryan, were still volunteers.

  “Tasley wouldn’t have a crew if it weren’t for the Applegates,” people said sometimes, because Charlie and Bryan showed up so often. Having spent most of their lives learning how to put cars together, they were particularly adept at taking cars apart, and were often called on for vehicle extrication.

  Charlie wasn’t great at taking charge of a situation, but he was excellent at following precise directions. He would await an assignment from the chief, go off to complete exactly and only that assignment, and then return for his next task. When Tasley was called to car accident scenes, Charlie was brilliant. He could point to exactly which pieces of twisted metal needed to be cut, using which piece of equipment. And he would run into any building, without hesitation. Shortly after Jeff Beall arrived in Accomack, Beall was called out to a burning funeral home. He and Charlie were the first ones in the building. The fire was in the back of the second floor, but the only way to access it was by using the stairs in the front of the first floor. In true Accomack fashion, the building had been constructed piecemeal over time. The hallways zigzagged and joists didn’t quite line up, and Beall and Charlie had to belly crawl toward the fire with the hose tucked under their arms, spraying water at the flames that popped and crackled like machine guns. They were laying on the hose, spraying at those flames with full force, but the water wasn’t doing anything. The flames kept getting brighter, and finally Beall yelled, “Dude, we gotta go,” and they left the hose right on the landing and fumbled downstairs.

  By the time they got outside, help had arrived, and one of the other volunteers pulled Beall aside. “We thought the flames were going to catch you,” he said. When Beall and Charlie had fought their way down the stairs they passed by a big picture window, the volunteer told Beall. Everyone outside watched through that window as the flames followed the two firefighters down the stairwell, licking the tops of their helmets. “We really thought the flames were going to catch you.”

  “It was the worse place I’ve ever been,” Beall would say when he told the story. “Me and Charlie.”

  Friday night poker at the firehouse, weekend barbecues with other volunteers, birthday parties for his daughter at the Tasley firehouse, with little kids trying on all the hats and boots. When the pager went off, Mary would joke about throwing it across the room, but the noise would make Charlie’s face light up. She didn’t think it was about the fire, particularly—unlike some firefighters, Charlie was just as excited to get called out for a fender bender as he was for a raging blaze. Mary sometimes wondered if what Charlie really liked wasn’t the fire aspect at all, but the camaraderie and the sense of being needed.

  He liked being needed, especially by women and children. He was always offering to beat people up, not because he was particularly interested in fighting, but because doing i
t seemed like the honorable thing to do. His friend Saira was with Charlie and some others at a bar when her ex came in. She was furious with her ex and wanted to have words, and while most of her other friends tried to convince her that he wasn’t worth her time, Charlie pulled her aside to ask quietly, “Want me to take care of him for you?” No, Saira said. But thanks for asking.

  And that seemed to be Charlie in a nutshell, thought the people who knew him—bouts of great heroism mixed with bouts of great boneheadedness. Getting sent to prison but then, while he was there, getting a commendation for his brave actions: one day while he and some other prisoners were being transported to a different location, he saw another car on the road spin out of control. He hollered until the van driver stopped and let him out, and then he ran to administer first aid to the victims—a mother and her young daughter, who were thrown from the car and died at the scene. The memory of this would haunt him for years. One of the bravest things he’d ever done, and it ended up all screwed up.

  After Charlie and Mary had been together for nearly a decade, their relationship started to go south. They’d been engaged for a while but could never seem to make it down the aisle. Mary blamed herself. She’d never been with someone who had remained faithful before, and she could never stop worrying that one day Charlie would cheat, too. Eventually, they both decided they couldn’t do it anymore, and Mary moved back to the Virginia mainland.

  And then people worried about Charlie, whose life so often seemed like it was held together by the collective effort of several invested parties. Mary had been good for him. She’d kept him off drugs, kept his energies focused in a cozy domesticity. And now she was gone, and things only got worse. Charlie’s favorite uncle died, and in a more devastating blow, his mother fell ill shortly after. She had always loved him, always believed and invested in him. He started using drugs again, but this time it didn’t seem paired with a desire to get high so much as a desire to get numb.