Barnes proceeded delicately. “The problem we’re having is you’re taking the rap for most of these, but we want to make sure whoever was involved in these is not going to continue. We’re basically trying to stop this.”
“They’re not going to continue,” Charlie assured them. “I’ll take the rap for them.”
This went on, with Charlie swearing that the fires were over and that he’d hated lighting them to begin with. Godwin and Barnes would ask how they could be sure the fires were over if Charlie kept leaving out details and saying, “No comment.” Hours passed.
It was nearly two in the morning. Godwin told Charlie he had one last chance to get everything off his chest before he was escorted back to the county jail. Charlie was bouncing his legs up and down, rolling his forehead against the heels of his handcuffed hands. He talked about Tonya: how she had saved him from cocaine on the first night they’d met, and how they were going to get married.
The fire on Savageville Road in Onancock? Yes. The one on Puncoteague Road by the pump? Yes. The one in Horntown, right as you came into the town? No comment.
Remember the chickens? Godwin and Barnes asked. He had let the chickens out of his neighbor’s coop. He was trying to be a good person.
Charlie asked if there was any way he’d get bond, and Godwin said that if he were being honest, and he was trying to be, then the answer was no.
Charlie stopped fidgeting. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “Fuck it, man,” he said, “I’m just going to tell you everything.”
“Now is the time to come clean,” Godwin agreed. “Get it off your chest.”
Charlie inhaled. “She set all of those.”
Tonya had been the one to actually hold the match for the first one, and the second one, and all of the ones up to number eleven or twelve, at which point she was almost spotted by a nearby police car, Charlie said. Worried that she could be hurt or caught, Charlie told her he would take over the actual lighting part.
The fires seemed to make her so happy. Mellow her out, open her up. And she was a good mother—“She don’t hit her kids, she really don’t even yell at them”—and she was so stressed out, and Charlie loved her, and if it came down to it, he would take the rap for all of the fires because he didn’t want her to have to go to prison. “I’ll go in the fucking courtroom and agree to every one of them.”
But why? Godwin and Barnes wanted to know. If he didn’t want to light the fires to begin with, why would he ever agree to do it?
Charlie leaned his elbows on the desk, covered his face with his hands, and talked through muffled fingers as he said the rest of what he needed to say. “The reason I could never say no—and I will not say this in court, news, any of it.”
“What is that, Charles?” Godwin asked, in a low whisper.
“We had this problem in our relationship,” he started, “and I love this girl to death.” He trailed off.
“Tell us the truth.”
“I am going to tell you the truth. But it’s hard for me.”
“Tell us.”
“I really fell in love with this girl. And most people that I been with in the past, they were just there. I settled for all of them, even the ones I was with for years, and I never was happy with them. And I was happy with this one,” he said. “And the moment I fell in love with her, my dick stopped working.”
There it was. The Thing. Said aloud in the conference room of the Eastern Shore drug task force office in Melfa was the mess that had defined all of the other messes in Charlie’s life. They were broke, they were isolated from their families, they didn’t know what to do about Tonya’s son, they were low on work, and they were going to the Food Lion and they were eating garbage. But all of this could have been dealt with if it weren’t for the fact that as soon as he’d fallen in love with Tonya Bundick, he couldn’t perform in bed and this was the worst thing he could have possibly imagined.
Charlie paused and struggled. “Up until a few nights ago, we hadn’t had sex in almost eighteen months. That was the only problem in our relationship. And I was doing whatever the fuck I could to keep her.”
“I got you,” Godwin said as Barnes nodded, both giving the impression that this was a normal sort of thing for them to hear in the course of an investigation. “I got you.”
Doctors hadn’t been able to help; he’d seen them and they told him the problem was all in his head. Ministers hadn’t been able to help either; he’d brought the problem up with John Burr from Onley Baptist. The pastor suggested that talking to a therapist might be beneficial, though Charlie hadn’t yet. And since none of it had helped, Charlie had done the one thing that seemed like it could make any difference at all to saving his relationship. He had lit the fires for Tonya.
Later on, the residents of Accomack would confuse this story a little bit. They would believe, and they would tell one another, that the fires had fixed Charlie’s impotence: that he and Tonya would light a house on fire and then go home and have wild sex. The fires never fixed the problem, though. In the true version, the fires were not lit for sex, but for love.
“Honestly, if we hadn’t caught you, it probably would have continued on,” Barnes told Charlie when the story was done. “Just from what you’re telling me, I don’t know if from that point you could have stopped.”
“I could have stopped,” Charlie promised. It wasn’t clear whether he believed it.
NOW THAT THE FINAL PIECE was in place, the piece that had to do with love, some of the other fires began to make a strange sort of sense.
J. D. Shreaves—the single dad who had returned to his house on Valentine’s day to see it burning—was an ex-boyfriend of Tonya’s. Tonya had been angry with the way they had broken up. Another man—who had woken up one morning to find a corner of his house inexplicably singed—was a friend who had a thing for Tonya, Charlie said. The man had flirted with her on Facebook, which Tonya said made her feel disrespected.
He did it for love. He tried to stop.
He didn’t, during the interview, go into how much they had tried. He didn’t, during that interview, talk about the times that Tonya had worried about what would happen to the boys if they were ever caught. Charlie would think they were done with the fires—but then a few days later something else would stress her out and they would be back to burning.