by Monica Hesse
People didn’t know that when Tonya was fighting with bullies on the bus, half of the time they weren’t her bullies. They were Anjee’s. Anjee got picked on for her clothes and shoes, too, but she was too meek to defend herself. Tonya, who was three years younger and half Anjee’s size, would do it for her, not hesitating for a moment before flying on them and yelling, “Leave my sister alone.” Maybe it was repayment for how Anjee covered for Tonya at home.
As an adult, Anjee realized their father must have been troubled himself. He had gone through the family albums at one point and cut his own face out of the family pictures, leaving photo after photo of a man whose head was replaced with jagged little holes. He must have carried a lot of self-hatred to do something like that. As an adult, she realized that her father must have been a miserable person.
Anjee had run away from home before she was eighteen and didn’t keep in contact with the family. She had made a life on her own, away from the Eastern Shore. She had children she was devoted to, and started a business refinishing antiques. She’d sent letters to her mother for a while but they came back marked “Addressee no longer lives here,” even though Anjee knew they hadn’t moved and the return-to-sender message was in her mother’s handwriting. She was sure her father had made her mother write those messages. It’s how he’d always dealt with any mail from people he didn’t want to talk to.
After running away, the first time that she came back home was because she heard that their father had died and—she knew it sounded crazy—she wanted to know if he really was dead. On the way down the Delmarva peninsula for the funeral, she stopped and picked up Tonya, who at that time was living in Pocomoke City, Maryland. At the funeral home, she learned that her father had had cancer of the liver and lungs and that it spread to his brain. She was sure it was the chemicals in all the fields that the farmers of Accomack County inhaled so they could eke out livings and bring food to the rest of the world. She hadn’t seen Tonya in more than four years, and her sister had become so beautiful.
The two of them tried, after that. Sporadic contact, introducing the cousins, and trying to learn sisterly behavior. Tonya and Anjee had two properties promised to them—the one they had grown up in, which belonged to their mother, and the one that belonged to their grandmother, which their father had been raised in. After Tonya found their mother dead in the backyard of her home, Anjee came down to help her deal with the estate.
When they were done cleaning out the house, they came up with the agreement that deeded that property to Tonya, with the idea that their grandmother’s house would go to Anjee. And their grandmother did die, and Anjee did move back to Accomack, at least for a little while. She came down with her boyfriend at the time, a guy she retroactively realized was no prize. One night at Tonya’s house, the boyfriend hit on Tonya, leaning in to kiss her when he didn’t know Anjee was in eyesight. She didn’t know if Tonya had encouraged it, but it didn’t look to her like Tonya had discouraged it, either. Shortly after, it happened again, and they got in a big fight. Anjee said things. About how she thought Tonya disgraced herself looking like she did when she left the house. About how Tonya thought people were jealous, but really they were just horrified that a mother would be wearing the kinds of clothes that she did. “You’re not in a photo shoot, you’re in a bar!” she remembered shouting, or something like that. And Tonya shouted back. And one of the things she shouted was that their deal was off. Anjee couldn’t have their grandmother’s house. “I’ll burn it down before I sign over those papers,” she remembered Tonya saying.
A year or so later it burned down.
But all of their history, all of their past—maybe that’s why Tonya dressed the way that she did. Because after a childhood of never having anything pretty, she longed for people to notice her as something beyond ugly and poor. And maybe that’s why Tonya loved her boys so furiously, because she had never felt that kind of protective love at home.
And maybe that’s why it had been so hard for the two sisters to have a relationship, for all those years. Because they had both been through something scary and sad, the kind of thing that could bring two people closer together, or it could make it impossible for them to be in the same room with each other because of their shared memories. Anjee had gotten out, and after therapy, had gotten better. Maybe some people were affected more than others, in ways nobody ever could have predicted.
When Anjee considered Tonya and their strained relationship, she thought about the oddest things. Like about how, when they were younger, Anjee didn’t like chicken and only wanted to eat her vegetables. But food was scarce, and she was hungry, and she knew she would be punished if she left food on her plate. So Tonya would offer to trade. She would tell Anjee she could have all the vegetables, saying she wanted more chicken for herself. It was only after a while that Anjee realized Tonya didn’t like the chicken, either. Sometimes Tonya wouldn’t eat it, instead hiding it under the bed and throwing it away at school the next day. Which meant sometimes Tonya didn’t have dinner at all.
Anjee would think about those small, delicate acts of kindness from her sister, and she would cry.
She didn’t know whether Tonya had lit those fires. But either way, she was afraid the county would see her as a monster, and she wanted Wade to know her sister wasn’t that.
LATER, IT WOULD TURN OUT THAT ANJEE wasn’t the only person whose heart would pang when she thought about Tonya.
A woman who had known Tonya during the time she lived in Chincoteague remembered how Tonya had offered to help her with her hair and makeup, and how, when the woman thanked her, Tonya said that she knew how important it was to be made to feel pretty. Her own family, the woman remembered her saying, never made her feel anything but bad.
Another friend remembered Tonya saying that her father had been mean, but not as mean as he’d been to her sister.
Another acquaintance, a man named Dale, heard about Tonya’s arrest when his father called him. Dale hadn’t thought of Tonya in years. They had dated during her last year of high school; he was a year or two older and they’d been introduced through friends.
Their relationship worked this way: the Bundick family didn’t have a telephone in the house, at least not one that Tonya seemed allowed to use. On Thursdays, her mother would drive her to a pay phone so she could call Dale and arrange a date. If she didn’t call, he would know that meant he wasn’t going to see her that weekend. If they did arrange a date, sometimes he got to her house and nobody would come to the door. The cars would be out front; he would know they were home. He would knock and call out that if Tonya didn’t want to see him, she only had to come to the door and say that herself. She wouldn’t come to the door. When he’d see her again a week or two later she never wanted him to mention those times.
Something in the house felt odd to Dale. He was young, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was, mostly just a bad feeling. It seemed off when Carroll would scream at him for his tires taking up too much space on the skinny driveway. Or when Tonya would sneak a phone call from the burger place where she worked, and tell Dale to never mention it to her parents or they would make her quit the job.
On the first occasion he invited her to dinner at his father’s house, he got back from driving her home and his father pulled him aside and told him, “Something’s not right. Something’s not right there.”
One night during her senior year of high school, Dale got a call and it was Tonya. She told him she’d gotten in a fight with her parents and one of them had thrown boiling water on her. She didn’t say what the fight was about. She just asked him to come and get her. His father pointed out that it might be better for an adult to be the one to go to the house, so Dale called his grandparents, who lived near Tonya. It was the first time, as he remembers, that Tonya ever acknowledged something was wrong in her house.
She lived with his grandparents for a few months, he remembered, before going to live with one of her distant relatives, an aunt or uncle who
lived a few towns over. Before, Tonya had been merely quiet. Now she seemed completely closed off, even to him. They couldn’t connect the way they used to. She seemed resentful, or maybe she was just embarrassed that he knew about her private life. The relationship didn’t last much longer. The experience had changed Tonya, but it had changed Dale, too, opening him up to a world of adult complexities. A few years older than Tonya, he’d already graduated high school and had his eye on joining the military. There had been things holding him to Accomack, though, and one of those things was Tonya. Now the biggest thing that had been keeping him there felt like a reason to leave. It wasn’t about Tonya, it was about the situation and how powerless it had made him feel.
No one else in Tonya’s life appeared to know that she wasn’t living at home anymore. In the “senior will and testament” section of her twelfth-grade yearbook, which was published after all of this happened, she left a note thanking Dale for a wonderful relationship, and giving “lots of love” to her mom and dad.
When Dale heard about Tonya and the arsons, it was because his father called him on the telephone and said, “Well. It looks like your ex-girlfriend’s been setting the world on fire. Didn’t you hear? Tonya’s the one they arrested.”
Dale let the news settle in and then told his dad, “It sounds horrible to say, but for some reason or another I’m not really surprised.” If someone had told him that one of his acquaintances had become an arsonist and asked him to guess which one, Tonya is who he would have picked. “By the time I had a chance to think about her childhood and family life,” Dale told his father, “I think she’d garnered a lot of anger. No doubt in my mind about that.”
It made him sad to think about the things in her that were probably broken a long time ago.
CHAPTER 22
“TIME TO WAKE UP”
THE COUNTY SEAT OF ACCOMACK was Accomac, which had come to be the center of government but lost a k along the way. It had little in the way of commerce but bail bondsmen and lawyers, clustered in small offices around the redbrick courthouse, and a small café that catered to the bail bondsmen and lawyers. The sheriff’s office and jail were directly across the street from the courthouse. The office of the Commonwealth’s attorney was kitty-corner from the courthouse, and in the middle of the triangle formed by the courthouse, jail, and Commonwealth’s attorney were the offices of Charlie’s defense attorney, Carl Bundick. It was within this small parcel of land that the preparations for the arsonists’ trial would begin to unfold.
Charlie didn’t need a trial. Charlie had already pleaded guilty; Charlie needed only to be sentenced. But the amount for which Charlie would be sentenced would depend on what happened with Tonya, who had pleaded not guilty. Tonya needed a trial. Because she’d been caught at the site of only one fire, and because there was no physical evidence linking either of them to the other crimes, she’d been charged with only one count of arson and one count of conspiracy. For the prosecution to charge her on anything else, or to get a guilty conviction on the charge they already had, what they needed was Charlie.
But first there was the matter of love.
The matter of love was proving difficult for Carl Bundick, who wanted to get the best situation possible for his client. Carl was, as his last name suggested, a Born Here, who had left the shore only to get a bachelor’s and a law degree. He’d once run for Commonwealth’s attorney against Gary Agar, but after being defeated, set up his private practice in a converted colonial house filled with ramshackle antiques and dusty candy bowls. Now, the issue at hand was this: While Charlie had eventually implicated Tonya in his confession, he hadn’t fully grasped what that would mean. In his mind, he’d done it as a means of explaining the fires. The police wanted to know if they’d caught all of the perpetrators, or if the arsons would keep going. Charlie wanted them to know that if they had caught him, and if they had caught Tonya, then there wouldn’t be any more fires.
Now Charlie was realizing the implications of that confession. The police and lawyers wouldn’t let him just volunteer to take the blame and have it be over. The lawyers wanted her put away, too, and they wanted him to help them do that. They wanted him to testify against her. Carl was pushing it hard, telling Charlie it would be good for him. How good, he couldn’t say. Gary Agar hadn’t approached Charlie’s attorney with any specific kind of deal, for two reasons: one, he knew that sentencing would ultimately be up to a judge, not him. And two, he knew that if Tonya did go to trial, juries tended not to trust witnesses whose testimonies they felt had been bought and paid for. It was better for Charlie to be able to testify and say, truthfully, that he hadn’t been offered anything specific in return.
So all that Charlie knew was that the maximum sentence for his crimes was up to 584 years—lifetimes of incarceration. And that he still loved Tonya.
Loving Tonya was more easily navigable than one might have imagined in the Accomack County Jail. The building was a small structure attached to the sheriff’s office. It had only a hundred beds and a kitchen that seemed, to inmates, incapable of producing anything but bologna sandwiches. Occasionally, inmates wrote letters to the local newspaper to complain about other issues with the jail: the paint was peeling, they said. It was small and crowded. There weren’t any activities or programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, to keep the inmates (who ranged from shoplifters to drunk drivers to murderers) minimally occupied. Before Charlie and Tonya arrived, the jail’s most famous inhabitant had been a man named Richard Godwin—no relation to the sheriff—an insurance and real estate mini-tycoon who preferred going by “Wrendo Johnson Periless Godwin” and was the Eastern Shore’s only presidential candidate to date, in the 2008 election. Wrendo Johnson Periless Godwin’s seventy thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benz had accrued multiple overdue speeding tickets, but the candidate decided that it was more important for him to keep on the campaign trail than to make his court date. Eventually, he was sentenced to ten days in the jail, and afterward told the Salisbury Daily Times that the place was in “severe” trouble. “You could hardly get to the bathroom,” he said, explaining that one night there were five inmates in his holding cell. (He eventually withdrew from the presidential campaign.)
Charlie knew the jail—it was where he’d spent time while awaiting sentencing for his previous crimes. The men and women were housed separately. But since the jail was small, and because there were windows that abutted the recreation yard where inmates walked around a weather-beaten flagpole, there were ways of getting in touch with other prisoners of the opposite sex.
After Charlie had been there several weeks, he heard someone outside of his cell window. The voice belonged to Tonya, he says. She was out for her fresh-air break, and the guard didn’t seem to be paying any attention.
It was the first time they’d spoken to each other since the night of the arrest.
In a whispered conversation in a miserable prison yard, she told him he knew what he had to do: he had to take responsibility for the fires—all of them. He had to explain to the police that he’d been on drugs when he gave his confession, and that’s why he had implicated Tonya, right? Because he knew she didn’t have anything to do with it, right? And that’s what he needed to tell the police. The right story, the true story.
He believed he understood what she was doing—communicating to him what she wanted him to do in a way that would be unimpeachable to anyone listening. He didn’t blame her for it. She had two kids who needed her: the younger was currently living with the boys’ father but the older was in foster care. The only person who needed Charlie right now was Tonya, and what she needed was for him to tell everyone that she had nothing to do with the fires.
Mostly, as they talked through the prison wall, he just told her how much he loved her.
After that first time in the prison yard, there were ways of staying in contact. There were cell mates to be whispered to who could pass messages. There was a small library shelf, and there were ways of sharing which book to look in for a let
ter, and there was the flagpole at one end of the miserable exercise yard. Inmates in some generation past had figured out that this pole made a serviceable landmark to bury notes near. This information had trickled down as general knowledge for the rest of the population. The preferred method was to write tiny notes in tiny handwriting, and then fold the paper up between two pieces of the plastic cutlery that was passed out with the bologna sandwiches, and then plunge the cutlery into the ground.
There was a different method that Charlie liked to use, which seemed appropriate given Tonya’s propensity for lip balm: he took a ChapStick container, sliced off a thin circle from the top of the balm, and discarded the rest. Into the mostly hollowed-out container, he rolled notes, some written in numeric code. Charlie wrote to Tonya this way, and Tonya wrote back. They passed messages about what their lawyers had said, and what they thought might happen and about how, despite everything, they were still deeply in love.
“You’re my Tiny Toot and I love you and I never want to lose you,” Charlie wrote. “I’m already scared if I get too much time, I’ll lose you. Sometimes I don’t think you really know just how much I love you. I’d rather die than lose you. I can’t picture life without you.”
Shortly after that, toward the end of September 2013, with money Charlie was never quite sure how she or anyone she knew had scraped together, Tonya was released on bond. She continued to write him letters from the outside. “Do they know that we didn’t do this?” she wrote. “Did you tell them about your drug use since your mom died?”
She was a good pen pal. He called her collect once a week. How could he agree to testify against her, when it was his fault they were trying to prosecute her to begin with? If he had just kept his mouth shut, everything would be fine. His lawyer didn’t know Tonya like he did. Gary Agar didn’t know Tonya like he did. They didn’t know how sweet and loving she could be.