American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Monica Hesse
PREFACE
I FIRST DROVE DOWN to Accomack County, Virginia, on Halloween weekend of 2013. There had been a bunch of fires there, two people had been arrested for setting them, and one of those people was now scheduled to submit his plea. At the time I was in the cruddiest place a journalist can be—between stories and out of ideas—and I’d asked my editor to send me to Accomack mostly because I was looking for an assignment that would get me out of the office for a day. Inside the courthouse, a red brick building that looked like a movie-set courthouse on a movie-set town square, the defendant in question admitted he was guilty, but didn’t say why he’d done it.
I spent the next two years trying to understand why he did it. The answer, inasmuch as there is an answer for these things, involved hope, poverty, pride, Walmart, erectile dysfunction, Steak-umms (the chopped meat sold in the frozen foods aisle), intrigue, and America. America: the way it’s disappointing sometimes, the way it’s never what it used to be.
But it also involved love. The kind of love that is vaguely crazy and then completely crazy and then collapses in on itself in a way that leaves the participants bewildered and telling very different stories about what actually happened. In this instance, the stories shared only one essential truth: When this string of fires began, the defendants were in love. By the time they finished, they weren’t.
AMERICAN FIRE
CHAPTER 1
“CHARGE THAT LINE!”
IT WAS COLD AND DRY, and Deborah Clark found herself wondering, briefly, whether the dryness was important. Fire had to come from somewhere, and if the dry ground had caused an electrostatic spark, then that would explain why, less than a hundred yards from her back steps, there were giant orange flames licking the night sky. A friend had seen them first; he’d pulled out of Deborah’s dirt drive after dinner and then frantically banged on her door a few minutes later, yelling, “Hey—the house across the field is on fire.” The field was small and rough and it had corn sometimes, with stalks that shook like paper, but it didn’t have corn this time of year. On the night of November 12, 2012, it had nothing but brown grass, the burning house, and the flames rolling in Clark’s direction.
Clark’s niece lived next door, in a place that looked the same as Clark’s and most of the other homes on that stretch of Virginia road: a pastel double-wide, well maintained but sinking, each plunked along a tight squeeze of a two-lane route. Now Clark ran to warn her niece about the burning house, which had been different from the others: it was fancy, two stories, white paint, hardwoods, generations of the same family living and dying and moving in and out, until finally somebody moved out and nobody moved in. Clark couldn’t remember the last time anyone had lived in that house. She knew it didn’t have working power.
Clark ran back to her own house and picked up the telephone. By the time the 911 dispatcher answered at 10:41 p.m., Clark had determined that electrostatic anomalies aside, there was really only one likely possibility for what had happened:
“I’m just calling,” she began, flustered and out of breath. “Somebody done set the house on fire on Dennis Drive!”
“Okay,” said the dispatcher at the Eastern Shore 911 Center, seven miles away. “What’s the address, ma’am?”
“I’m on Dennis Drive—I don’t know the address.”
“Is it your house?”
“No—it’s a big house, an empty house.”
“Nobody’s in the house, ma’am?”
“No,” Clark said.
“Is anybody around the house?”
“No,” she said.
Now the fire had lit the night like a flashbulb, causing the air around it to go bright and blurry and sending waves of heat onto her property line.
“It’s blazing,” she begged the dispatcher. “It’s getting in the field. It’s about to get everywhere.”
“We’ll go ahead and get the fire department on the way.”
Before the call even ended, the dispatcher had already plugged Clark’s location into his dispatch system, which immediately began calculating the fire stations that were in the jurisdiction of the call. The current policy was to summon four stations in order to make sure enough bodies and enough pressurized water showed up at the scene. All of the fire stations in Accomack County were operated by volunteers. The manpower for any given fire was entirely dependent on who didn’t need to pull a double shift at the chicken factory, and who wasn’t stuck overnight on a crabbing boat in the Chesapeake Bay, and who didn’t have a baby teething at home, and who could stumble out of bed and race to the fire station in time, leaving pickup trucks askew in station parking lots, and jumping into fire engines that screamed at 130 decibels and shook off any remaining sleep.
“Stations 7, 6, 8, and 18,” the dispatcher now said into his headset. The computer-aided system had finished its calculations and provided the closest fire stations, and now, from his cubicle, the dispatcher began to organize emergency response via radio. “Station 7—fire and EMS response. Residential structure fire, Dennis Drive, Parksley,” he said into his headset. “Caller has advised apparent abandoned structure, fully involved.”
All around the county, heavy black pagers were going off in living rooms and bedrooms, first ringing with the two-noted tone reserved for each particular station, and then coming alive with static-filled instructions. At his home and preparing to eat a slice of cake for his fifty-first birthday, Phil Kelley, the chief of Station 7, the Parksley Fire Department, heard the request for his department to bring both a fire engine and an ambulance. He knew this signified that his station was “first due”: although three additional stations would arrive to assist, he would be in charge of controlling the scene. He heard the dispatcher describe the fire as “fully involved,” and he knew that, if the description was accurate, it would mean there were flames showing. Fully involved meant the fire was bad.
“Chief 7, en route to station,” he radioed in at 10:44 p.m., three minutes after Deborah’s 911 call.