American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  “And you still set it on fire?”

  Charlie shrugged. “She’s a lot smarter than me, and she said it wasn’t.” He giggled. “But I had never seen that many cars before.”

  They took him through the actual setting of the fire—what part of the house he’d lit, whether he’d used any accelerants, what color the shop rag was that he’d stuffed in the house, whether he stood there after the fire was set to watch it. Backdoor, Charlie said. No accelerants. Plain white. No watching, he’d just run.

  “We appreciate you, Charles,” Godwin encouraged him. “We appreciate you telling the truth, Bubba. Listen to this. Nobody was hurt.”

  “That makes a big difference,” Barnes agreed. Nobody was hurt.

  Charlie shook his head. “I never wanted to do it in the first fucking place.”

  “What made you?” Barnes asked, at the same time Godwin asked, “What happened?’

  “I’m not going to tell you what,” Charlie said, and then immediately apologized: “I’m not trying to be smart.”

  Barnes and Godwin nodded at this. They didn’t need a motive in order for Charlie to be guilty. But some kind of reason would have made the whole thing make more sense to them.

  “Everybody has a reason,” Barnes said, “for why they do things in life.”

  “Trust me, I never enjoyed it.” Charlie told him.

  “It’s something like, somebody did something to you? Pushed you away from something? Or—”

  “Naw. It was just a problem I’ve had, and this was my way to—”

  “Deal with it?” Godwin finished the sentence for him. “Was it your mom passing?”

  “That don’t help,” Charlie acknowledged, “but there’s more to it.”

  “Well, listen, we’ll do this interview and then we’ll do whatever you want,” Godwin reassured him. “We’ll do whatever you need to get you straight.”

  “Is she here?” Charlie asked suddenly. “Tonya?”

  “She’s not,” Barnes told him.

  “Is she going to be here?”

  “What do you need?” Godwin asked.

  Charlie folded his hands, shoulders slumped. “I wanted to see her.”

  Rob couldn’t let the motive go. Was the problem Charlie had mentioned having—did it have to do with the fire departments? Was he mad at the fire departments? Or at law enforcement? “In our minds, we’re trying to figure out—I don’t want to say the motive, but, is it something against us? The state police or the sheriff or county? Or is it an individual? Or just the way you’re expressing how you’re pissed off?”

  “I’m not even pissed off,” Charlie insisted.

  “You know, we thought you were mad at us,” Godwin said.

  “Not at all. I have the utmost respect for you all.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Godwin said.

  Barnes looked down at the stack of papers he’d set on the table, each sheet containing descriptions of the eighty-six fires that had been set. If Charlie wasn’t ready to talk about why he’d done them, at least he might be willing to talk about which ones he’d done.

  Did Charlie do a woods fire on Dennis Drive? Yes, Charlie said. A bungalow on Seaside Road? Yes, said Charlie. Metompkin Road in Bloxom? Yes. The Drummond fire from the night before? Yes. The two-story farmhouse on Church Road? Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

  “What about Greenbush Road, just outside of Parksley on 316 at Wycheville? You know, where Coor’s garage is, and Associated Farms is across the street?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said.

  “Where did you light that one?”

  “Underneath of it.”

  “On the back side? Front side?”

  “Right in the middle.”

  “So how did you get—”

  “Crawled underneath the house.”

  “Okay.”

  Barnes had been holding the fires in his head, the geography and details of them, and he wanted to get Charlie to remember as many of them as possible. The two men swapped their knowledge of back roads, hidden shortcuts, mossy fields, and half-drained creeks. The interview became a geography bee. “Now, back on Nocks Landing Road, basically, across from Arcadia High School,” Barnes said. “You’re taking the road like you’re heading toward Atlantic, and then it’s the house at the intersection of Page Fisher Road. If you’re taking that stoplight and hang a right like you’re going toward Atlantic. It’s a little house down there about a quarter of a mile. It’s near a little intersection?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said.

  “The unoccupied store on the highway in Parksley?” Barnes asked.

  “I ain’t got no comment on that.”

  Godwin’s and Barnes’s faces didn’t register anything; they didn’t even look at each other. But they both noticed that this was the first fire he’d refused to comment on, and they both wondered what that was about.

  “Drummond Lane right down the street from the Forestry?”

  “No comment.”

  “Hopeton Road, a big house that was for sale?”

  “No comment,” Charlie said. “Can I pee real quick?”

  “Yeah,” Barnes said, and he and Godwin both got to their feet to show Charlie to the restroom.

  Charlie stood up as well. “You can write ‘No comment’ for the rest of them.”

  THE CONFESSION was taking a strange and winding path. Often in interviews like this, the suspect would do everything he could to avoid implicating himself—making excuses, pointing fingers at his cohorts, trying to rationalize his actions by claiming extenuating circumstances. Here, they had a man who had willingly and sheepishly put up his hands and admitted wrongdoing. He had gone over, in great detail, which fires he had set, and how, and he appeared to try his best to remember all of the circumstances behind them. But at the same time, he was refusing to offer the information that might help him receive a lighter punishment. He wouldn’t say why he’d done it. He wouldn’t say if anyone else had helped him. Sometimes he would go on in earnest detail about a how a big fire was lit, only to answer “No comment” when Barnes asked about a fire that had been smaller and more innocuous.

  While Charlie peed, Godwin and Barnes each tried to puzzle through the inconsistent behavior. Charlie was the one with the firefighting experience. Charlie was the one with the criminal past. Charlie was the one who had some of the traits of a serial arsonist. But when he said he hadn’t lit them all, did he mean that some of them had been lit by Tonya?

  The three men came back into the room after the bathroom break and sat in their original chairs.

  “Can I ask you this?” Godwin said. “Is there a reason you don’t want to comment on some of these first fires?”

  “Was there a significant change to where you started and where you ended?” Barnes offered. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Possibly,” Charlie allowed.

  Godwin raised his hands, as if to frame an idea: “It sounds like to me, Charles—I’m just throwing this out there—that we originally had somebody else involved in these first fires.”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie shook his head.

  “If we take her out of the equation,” Barnes tried, “other than you commenting about her, was there anybody other than her to drop you off?”

  “No comment.”

  Barnes proceeded delicately. “The problem we’re having is you’re taking the rap for most of these, but we want to make sure whoever was involved in these is not going to continue. We’re basically trying to stop this.”

  “They’re not going to continue,” Charlie assured them. “I’ll take the rap for them.”

  This went on, with Charlie swearing that the fires were over and that he’d hated lighting them to begin with. Godwin and Barnes would ask how they could be sure the fires were over if Charlie kept leaving out details and saying, “No comment.” Hours passed.

  It was nearly two in the morning. Godwin told Charlie he had one last chance to get everything off his chest before he was escorted back to
the county jail. Charlie was bouncing his legs up and down, rolling his forehead against the heels of his handcuffed hands. He talked about Tonya: how she had saved him from cocaine on the first night they’d met, and how they were going to get married.

  The fire on Savageville Road in Onancock? Yes. The one on Puncoteague Road by the pump? Yes. The one in Horntown, right as you came into the town? No comment.

  Remember the chickens? Godwin and Barnes asked. He had let the chickens out of his neighbor’s coop. He was trying to be a good person.

  Charlie asked if there was any way he’d get bond, and Godwin said that if he were being honest, and he was trying to be, then the answer was no.

  Charlie stopped fidgeting. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “Fuck it, man,” he said, “I’m just going to tell you everything.”

  “Now is the time to come clean,” Godwin agreed. “Get it off your chest.”

  Charlie inhaled. “She set all of those.”

  Tonya had been the one to actually hold the match for the first one, and the second one, and all of the ones up to number eleven or twelve, at which point she was almost spotted by a nearby police car, Charlie said. Worried that she could be hurt or caught, Charlie told her he would take over the actual lighting part.

  The fires seemed to make her so happy. Mellow her out, open her up. And she was a good mother—“She don’t hit her kids, she really don’t even yell at them”—and she was so stressed out, and Charlie loved her, and if it came down to it, he would take the rap for all of the fires because he didn’t want her to have to go to prison. “I’ll go in the fucking courtroom and agree to every one of them.”

  But why? Godwin and Barnes wanted to know. If he didn’t want to light the fires to begin with, why would he ever agree to do it?

  Charlie leaned his elbows on the desk, covered his face with his hands, and talked through muffled fingers as he said the rest of what he needed to say. “The reason I could never say no—and I will not say this in court, news, any of it.”

  “What is that, Charles?” Godwin asked, in a low whisper.

  “We had this problem in our relationship,” he started, “and I love this girl to death.” He trailed off.

  “Tell us the truth.”

  “I am going to tell you the truth. But it’s hard for me.”

  “Tell us.”

  “I really fell in love with this girl. And most people that I been with in the past, they were just there. I settled for all of them, even the ones I was with for years, and I never was happy with them. And I was happy with this one,” he said. “And the moment I fell in love with her, my dick stopped working.”

  There it was. The Thing. Said aloud in the conference room of the Eastern Shore drug task force office in Melfa was the mess that had defined all of the other messes in Charlie’s life. They were broke, they were isolated from their families, they didn’t know what to do about Tonya’s son, they were low on work, and they were going to the Food Lion and they were eating garbage. But all of this could have been dealt with if it weren’t for the fact that as soon as he’d fallen in love with Tonya Bundick, he couldn’t perform in bed and this was the worst thing he could have possibly imagined.

  Charlie paused and struggled. “Up until a few nights ago, we hadn’t had sex in almost eighteen months. That was the only problem in our relationship. And I was doing whatever the fuck I could to keep her.”

  “I got you,” Godwin said as Barnes nodded, both giving the impression that this was a normal sort of thing for them to hear in the course of an investigation. “I got you.”

  Doctors hadn’t been able to help; he’d seen them and they told him the problem was all in his head. Ministers hadn’t been able to help either; he’d brought the problem up with John Burr from Onley Baptist. The pastor suggested that talking to a therapist might be beneficial, though Charlie hadn’t yet. And since none of it had helped, Charlie had done the one thing that seemed like it could make any difference at all to saving his relationship. He had lit the fires for Tonya.

  Later on, the residents of Accomack would confuse this story a little bit. They would believe, and they would tell one another, that the fires had fixed Charlie’s impotence: that he and Tonya would light a house on fire and then go home and have wild sex. The fires never fixed the problem, though. In the true version, the fires were not lit for sex, but for love.

  “Honestly, if we hadn’t caught you, it probably would have continued on,” Barnes told Charlie when the story was done. “Just from what you’re telling me, I don’t know if from that point you could have stopped.”

  “I could have stopped,” Charlie promised. It wasn’t clear whether he believed it.

  NOW THAT THE FINAL PIECE was in place, the piece that had to do with love, some of the other fires began to make a strange sort of sense.

  J. D. Shreaves—the single dad who had returned to his house on Valentine’s day to see it burning—was an ex-boyfriend of Tonya’s. Tonya had been angry with the way they had broken up. Another man—who had woken up one morning to find a corner of his house inexplicably singed—was a friend who had a thing for Tonya, Charlie said. The man had flirted with her on Facebook, which Tonya said made her feel disrespected.

  He did it for love. He tried to stop.

  He didn’t, during the interview, go into how much they had tried. He didn’t, during that interview, talk about the times that Tonya had worried about what would happen to the boys if they were ever caught. Charlie would think they were done with the fires—but then a few days later something else would stress her out and they would be back to burning.

  The one thing Charlie did go into, again and again, is that there had been no grand master plan with the fires. There had been no elaborate strategy for which house they would burn down. There had been no advanced surveillance or vision. Every night, they had merely gone out and burned down whatever house they happened to feel like burning. And that they really did try to stop.

  The interview had lasted several hours, but mostly because it took that long just to list all the addresses of all the fires and ask if Charlie did them. Some of them he said he didn’t remember. He swore it wasn’t because he was trying to be evasive, but just that there were a lot of fires and it was hard to remember each one in particular. He suggested that he might recognize the houses if he saw them in person, and it was decided that the next step would be to pile into a patrol car and ride around to some of the sites in question.

  “We’ll let you go to the sites,” Godwin said. “It’s going to be an all-day thing, Charles. It’s going to be a long day, just so you know.”

  One last thing Charlie wanted to get off his chest, he told them: the graffiti. The graffiti that had been all over town, disparaging the couple, Jay Floyd and Danielle. He and Tonya had done that. They were mad because their friends had said they thought Charlie and Tonya shouldn’t be together.

  The graffiti, which had until the arsons been the biggest crime in Accomack County, which had bothered Godwin for months—if law enforcement had just caught the graffiti artists, the arsons never would have happened.

  Both Godwin and Barnes said how much they appreciated Charlie’s cooperation.

  At one point, Charlie asked if he could smoke a cigarette. Barnes said he could, and called for somebody to bring in an ashtray. Then he called for someone to bring in a lighter.

  “I got a lighter,” Charlie said.

  CHAPTER 19

  “I CAN’T TELL YOU SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW”

  A FEW MILES AWAY, Scott Wade and his colleague Keenon Hook were not having the same luck.

  Wade had been awakened at home by the sound of a ringing phone—his supervisor, hollering that two people had been caught, and that Wade needed to get his butt down to the station ASAP to conduct an interview with one of them. Wade thought it was an April Fools’ joke at first; it was just a little before midnight on April 1. But when he hung up the phone it immediately rang again with another person
delivering the news. By the time he finally had his clothes on, he’d had been interrupted by at least fifteen people.

  He’d been told he would be questioning Tonya Bundick. He thought he knew the name, but it wasn’t until he arrived at the Exmore police station, that he was 100 percent certain his memory had been right. Tonya was the woman who he and the sheriff had talked to along with Charles Smith on Christmas Day. The same woman whose house he had visited, the one who had told him the arsonist was probably on Facebook.

  And now she was here, in a small interrogation room in Exmore, and it was Wade’s job to get her to talk. Beside him sat Keenon Hook, another investigator.

  For suspect interviews, Wade liked to base his own demeanor on the behavior of the suspect, trying to match them in tone and body language. Sometimes it was better to be bold and hard-charging, sometimes to take things easy. He had seen Tonya when she walked through the station, and paid close attention to her behavior. She was crying. Not sobbing, but she did have tears in her eyes.

  “Can you bring me my ChapStick?” she asked him.

  “How about some water?” he suggested, making it clear that her comfort and happiness were important to him. “We have water. We’ll get you some ChapStick, too. It’s not special, is it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Do have your ID on you, by any chance?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I know it’s Tonya, but what is your full name?”

  “Tonya Susan Bundick.”

  He asked her a few more pro forma questions, and then turned back to her well-being. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not all right.”

  “Look, we’re going to get through this,” he reassured her. “I know you’re upset. You have to take a deep breath. It’s over now. We need to talk to you to get everything straightened out. We want to know where everything is—it’s not the end of the world. I deal with a lot of people over here, a lot of times, and they think it’s the end of the world. It’s not. Everybody makes mistakes. Let’s just start over right now and move on with the rest of your life. All right?”