THE NIGHT that Whispering Pines burned down, the county came together. State police investigators Barnes and Neal had office space in the nearby Virginia Department of Forestry; if Neal had been in his office at the time, he would have been able to see flames from his desk. Local teachers and nursery owners and waitresses all heard the warnings on the radio to stay away because traffic was being diverted, and then they all got in their cars and drove precisely to the spot they had been instructed to avoid, just to see it. Pete Blackman, the DJ who had agreed to work Charlie and Tonya’s wedding, happened to be driving nearby and saw flames, and the way the whole landscape seemed to ooze with fire. “It looked,” he would later say, “like hell was coming up through the ground.”
The fire happened, an article in the local news by reporter Carol Vaughn would later point out, “within yards of an electronic sign on Route 13 advertising a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonists.” The sign was later changed, warning motorists about heavy smoke in the area.
The news article offered other pieces of information: how one of the onlookers, Charlie Russell, watched the fire because in 1931 his grandfather had constructed the hotel dining room’s knotty pine walls that were, in 2013, the first thing to burn. How the grandfather, Charles F. Russell, had offered a prize of a ten-dollar gold piece to the area resident who came up with the winning name for the soon-to-open hotel. How the winner had been a girl named Pearl Bryan, a senior at Accomack High School, who suggested the name “Whispering Pines Tourist Camp.” A gala dinner and dance had celebrated the opening of what was the Delmarva peninsula’s first modern resort. The parking lot was always full, and the Russell family ran the resort until 1972 when they sold it to a man named Ralph Powers, who shortly thereafter died in front of the building when the truck he was fixing accidentally slipped into gear and ran over him.
Some people were glad to see it go, knowing that it had been an unsafe eyesore. But it was still a sad thing. The fires were causing the county’s past to vanish: landmarks gone, horizons changed.
The firefighters of Accomack County fought that fire with the same diligence and care that they fought every fire. Objectively, it wasn’t the worst fire of anyone’s career. Nobody’s life was in danger, nobody needed to fight their way up a burning stairwell, the way Beall and Charlie once did in that burning funeral home. But it was the essential fire. It was the fire they had dreaded and the fire they would talk about. It exhausted them.
“We just did a walk around; everything’s clear,” said one firefighter into his radio, as March 12 slid into the dark hours of March 13.
“We’re outta here,” said the chief from Wachapreague, as his volunteers finished up their assigned duties. “Good luck. Call us if you need us.”
As time dragged on, radio updates became less frequent, there was nothing to do but wait as planned for the fire to wear itself down. The beginnings of fires were always filled with adrenaline and anticipation. The ends of them were soot and weariness and fire hoses that needed to be cleaned. The ground was hot and the wood wasn’t wood anymore. The parts of the hotel that hadn’t burned—the rooms with the blue furniture and gold-filigree wallpaper—would be so doused in water as to retain a permanent stench of mildew. Fire killed one part of the hotel, water killed another, and eventually, months later, the earth would snake up through the collapsed beams, saplings and vines snaking through the fallen architecture, and in this way the old hotel was completely given over to the elements, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“We’re done. Let’s shut everything down, baby,” Beall finally said into his radio. It was 2:51 a.m.
The Whispering Pines hotel took nearly six hours to burn down, causing $300,000 worth of damage. When it was finally under control, the news reporters, who had positioned their trucks around the perimeter, establishing their live shots and doing sound checks, began to approach the soot-covered volunteers, beckoning them to position themselves near the gutted-out front entrance of the hotel, where the devastation was the most severe and the shot was the most dramatic.
A reporter from the Salisbury Fox affiliate latched herself onto Beall and asked if he would do an interview. He said okay. He was getting good at sound bites by this point; he’d given enough interviews. “We all have jobs. We all have families. We all have lives,” he told the camera. “This has cut into everything. Our fuel cost is tripled. We’re going through a lot of equipment. The biggest toll it’s taking is on personnel. We’re all volunteers, and it’s really taking its toll.”
After the interview, the reporter, Cleo Greene, had to wait for her next live shot. Beall thought she looked cold and sleepy and he was right; she lived ninety minutes away and had driven down to the fire scene as soon as the scanner app went off on her own phone. Beall said if she had more interview questions, they could go sit in his truck where it was warmer. He must have drifted off midsentence, and the reporter must have followed suit soon after, because the next thing he knew, the news station’s cameraman was tapping on the glass and pointing at his watch. They had to get back up to Maryland to file their piece. “Is there a message you’d like to send to the arsonist?” Greene asked.
“Take a break,” Beall said. “I need one.”
The news reporter asked him what his plans were for the rest of the day, now that the Whispering Pines fire was put out.
“I’m going to go home and take a shower and come right back,” he told her.
“Why are you going to come back?” he remembered her asking.
“Because this is my fucking fire.”
FINALLY, IT HAD TO BE OVER. There could have been no better metaphor and no better final message for the arsonist than burning down Whispering Pines. If he had burned down Whispering Pines and then stopped, he would have burned down sixty-six buildings and he never would have been caught. That would have been a more appropriate end to the story, an unsolved mystery, a blaze of glory. But the pagers went off the next night, and it wasn’t over quite yet.
CHAPTER 14
TONYA AND CHARLIE