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
SCHR?DINGER’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.