They couldn’t ask anyone for help. Charlie thought Tonya didn’t want to. She said that if they displayed any kind of weakness, other people were likely to use it against them. Their good friends Jay and Danielle were recently less a part of their lives. Danielle, after trying to match them together, had decided they weren’t good together and was trying to break them up. She said Charlie wasn’t good enough for Tonya. It made the couple furious.
And all of that might have been bearable, except for this other Thing, this big Thing. This other, big, embarrassing Thing that Charlie didn’t know how to deal with. This Thing had started to make him feel like he wasn’t good enough for Tonya and afraid others would think so, too. He was afraid she would leave him any day.
He needed to talk to somebody about the Thing, so one day he showed up at the office of John Burr, a local Baptist minister who had comforted Charlie’s family when his mother died. Burr didn’t know Charlie well, but he was a patient, unflappable listener. He encouraged Charlie to come to Bible study, which Charlie did, and also to bring Tonya into his office so they could all talk about the Thing together. At one of those meetings, Charlie and Tonya asked Burr if he would be the minister at their wedding. Burr thought about it and decided he couldn’t; it would go against his beliefs to marry two people who were already living together. In order for him to perform the ceremony, Charlie would need to first move out so they could recommit themselves to doing things the right way. Charlie was angry.
“Calm down,” Tonya told him in the presence of the minister. “It’s okay.”
It didn’t feel okay. None of it did. It felt like their world used to be beautiful and now it was shit.
The strange, surreal aspect about all of this is that nobody else knew how bad it had gotten. Both Tonya and Charlie had told a few people that they were struggling with the kids, but others assumed it was just normal growing pains. People knew vaguely that there were money troubles—though they believed them to just be wedding related, the way weddings stretched many couple’s budgets. Only a few people seemed to start to see the cracks. An old friend noticed that Charlie seemed more withdrawn than usual. At work, Bryan Applegate thought his brother seemed sadder and sadder, for lack of a better way to describe it. He thought Charlie’s relationship might be to blame, but he never brought it up; it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a younger brother should mention.
Tonya and Charlie were still going out for dinners, and making it to the bar once or twice a week, because keeping up appearances seemed so deeply important to Tonya, Charlie thought, and because despite everything, neither of them was able to fully accept what was painfully obvious: in the span of six months, their lives had fallen apart.
A respite from all of this was driving, out at night, after the kids were safely asleep. They drove to McDonalds or to Walmart, the place where Tonya had always been able to make Charlie laugh. Or they drove out to nowhere in particular. Miles of empty roads in Accomack meant hours of time to blow off steam.
And then one night, they were driving around the county like they always did, trying to sort through their lives like they always did. Charlie remembered Tonya telling him how grateful she was that he was in her life. Maybe God had put him there for a reason, to help her with her son and to show her that it was possible for a troubled kid to grow up and be a good man. She knew it hadn’t been easy on Charlie, and she wanted him to know that he could leave if he needed to, no hard feelings. On this night, she said that just as they were driving past an old abandoned house on Dennis Drive. It was November 12, 2012.
“I’m in it for the long haul,” Charlie said. “I’ll do whatever it takes for you to be happy.”
Tonya said, as Charlie remembered, “Get out and set that house on fire.”
Charlie looked up. It was such a non sequitur to anything they’d been discussing, he wondered if he’d misheard something.
They’d already driven once past an old white house set back in the field, and now Tonya, who was driving, looped back again and had pulled to a stop.
“I want you to set that house on fire,” she repeated. Charlie laughed. He realized he’d heard right, but now assumed it was some kind of joke, Tonya messing around, like she did at Walmart or McDonalds to put them in better moods.
Keeping up with the joke, he got out of the car. He walked through the field, into the house, and stood around for a while, wondering how far he was supposed to take the prank. She pulled away with the car, and few minutes later, she called him on his cell phone. “Have you done it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he teased back. “I done it.”
After a few minutes, the car pulled back around. When Charlie got inside, he was surprised. It didn’t seem like Tonya. It seemed like a different version of Tonya: a lighter, happier version he hadn’t seen in months. That’s when he realized she’d been serious. She wasn’t in a better mood because she’d been joking about the house. She was in a better mood because she’d been serious, and she thought he’d done as she asked. She was a beautiful, mysterious woman that he still, after several years, at some level didn’t know at all.
The realization made him worried and confused. But it was mixed with relief. After months of feeling like he was a disappointment to Tonya, like she was on the verge of leaving him, he had finally done something that made her happy.
They drove around and it was just like old times, like Tonya was imagining all the bad stuff had gone up in the smoke of that ugly house on Dennis Drive that nobody lived in anymore anyway.
After an hour, she wanted to go back and see the burning house. They did, but it wasn’t burning. Charlie made up an excuse about how it could take a while for the flames to show because he’d set the fire in a small closet. They drove past it again and again, and Tonya kept asking why she didn’t see any flames yet. Eventually, Charlie couldn’t think of any other excuses. He had to tell her he’d lied. He hadn’t actually lit anything on fire.
She didn’t seem mad, really. Just a little exasperated that she’d entrusted Charlie with a task he clearly wasn’t up to. “Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” he remembered her teasing, but almost in a friendly, flirtatious way.
They went back, and they burned that house down, Charlie says, and then they burned sixty-six more after it.
CHAPTER 15
“THEY’RE NOT HUNTERS AT ALL”
APRIL 1.
The team of criminal profilers—Isaac van Patten, Jon Cromer, Ron Tunkel, Ken Morris—had been coordinating the psychological part of the investigation from afar for too long. Five and a half months into the fires and they still hadn’t all been to Accomack at the same time. Tunkel had come down once around Christmas, but that was a period when the fires came to a stop for a couple of weeks. At the time everyone had hoped they were done for good, so Tunkel had gone back home. Isaac Van Patten hadn’t been there at all.