He told her about the photograph from Church Road, the one in which there was a figure that everyone had suspected was a woman. He talked about her cell phone, and how technicians would be able to see whether it had really been at home all those nights she said Charlie was at work and she was at home.
He knew he must be using the right tone, because her eyes were locked on his, she was leaning in and fully engaged. Cromer felt like he was watching her balance on a precipice, and it wasn’t clear yet which way she would fall. He’d been in plenty of interviews before where, as a strategy, he’d feigned a certain position or set of emotions in order to elicit a particular response. This time he found it wasn’t necessary. He genuinely believed it would be better for Tonya if she confessed. He could see her future stretching in front of her, two possible paths depending on what she said now. He found himself talking to Tonya like he talked to his own daughter, as calmly and matter-of-factly as he could, worried that she did not understand what her silence was costing her.
“Everywhere your phone has gone, whether it’s been in the on position, it has been pinging towers logging your location,” he told her. “That is the truth. You will not see your phone. You will not see the routes the phones were drawing on a map. You will not see that man until you testify, and he is honest, and he’s a good man. He’s the only one that is going to admit to the fires. He’s going to come clean with me. I do not want you to admit to something you did not do, but I want you to understand this clearly. I want you to tell the truth about what you did do, because if you don’t, you will stand in front of the judge. There will be Charlie. And he will say, ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake. These things in life set these things into motion, and it went crazy. For two days of it, we had fun. Then it went crazy, but that’s the truth of it, judge.’ And when Charlie gives details that no one but the person who was there would possibly know, then the judge will know he’s telling the truth. And where will you be? I would not want to—”
“You give me a paper and I’ll sign it,” she broke in, “because I haven’t done anything. So write it up and let me put my signature on it, and you can take me to a cell and do what you need to do.”
“Help us—” he began again.
“I don’t know what to tell you all. Write it up and let me sign it and let me go. Put me in a cell.”
“Tell me—” he stared again.
“That’s all I know.”
“Here’s what I want to tell you. They said—”
“What don’t you get? I didn’t do it, and I don’t know. What don’t you all understand?” she asked.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, then I don’t know what you believe.”
“I believe Charlie,” he said.
“I don’t care. I didn’t do it. So believe it. I’m over it. I’m done talking. I’m pleading the Fifth. I want a lawyer, because I’m done.”
Cromer felt his chest constrict. It was over. He’d barely been in there for five minutes before she had ended the interview by asking for an attorney. He didn’t know whether he’d read her mood completely wrong, or whether he’d hit such a nerve that he’d made Tonya scared. Either way, his chance was over. He left the room and Wade reappeared, preparing to handcuff Tonya so she could be left alone while they figured out how to proceed next.
“Put your hands up for me,” he instructed, when it was just the two of them in the room. “Is that too tight?”
“No,” she said.
He knew they hadn’t gotten much of anything that would be useful in court. Two years later, after everything was all over, he would still feel like he hadn’t understood her at all. Later, Todd Godwin would wish he had been in the room with Tonya. He would wonder if, because he’d once asked about her sons at the Royal Farms and because she seemed to like him, he could have gotten her to talk. But Wade knew he was good at his job. He knew Keenon Hook was good at his job. He knew that Jon Cromer was one of the most skilled interviewers he’d ever encountered in his life, and none of them had been able to get her to talk. He didn’t know if anyone would ever be able to get her to say anything at all.
“We’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said now, and left the room.
CHAPTER 20
“MIDNIGHT WITHOUT MAKEUP”
THE NEWS TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY in messy, unpredictable ways. The idea that the suspected arsonists had been a couple was shocking. Bonnie and Clyde of the Eastern Shore.
The Facebook groups dedicated to speculating over the identity of the arsonists now dedicated themselves just as fully to analyzing Charlie and Tonya. It took seven hours, postarrest, for someone to post Tonya’s bedraggled mug shot on the site, and a few minutes after that for someone else to comment, “Midnight without makeup is not how you want to make your close-up with the mug-shot camera.”
Then someone posted a different picture, from Tonya’s personal Facebook page and with better lighting, and the narratives began to change. People recognized her from out at Shuckers, or from way back when in high school. Another person wondered if this was the same Tonya Bundick whose mother used to submit recipes to the church cookbooks.
People remembered Charlie as a volunteer firefighter, the kid their brother sat next to on the bus, the guy who fixed cars and had those drug troubles. During the course of these postings, the moderators periodically removed information that they felt held too many personal details, or too many unverified rumors. Periodically, someone interrupted the discussion to offer thoughts and prayers, prayers and thoughts, to all of the victims of all of the fires.
Off-line, a man who lived down the street from Tonya and happened to share the same last name was bombarded at work by friends wanting to know if they were related. “Yeah,” he lied, practicing a shake of the head that seemed appropriately mournful. “She was my first wife.” One coworker replied that Tonya, in her mug shot, was looking pretty rough. “Yeah,” the neighbor said again. “She took the breakup pretty hard.” Another Bundick, no relation, found himself subject to similar speculation—faraway media members who didn’t know anything about the shore had gotten their hands on a couple of phone directories and started dialing everyone with the name. This Bundick spent the morning fielding phone calls from harried junior producers of radio and TV news shows. He didn’t bother to hand the phone to his cubicle mate at work, who really was related to Tonya, a cousin, but had a different last name.
On Matthews Road, Lois Gomez woke up to see a police car parked in the driveway of her neighbor’s house, but she assumed it was nothing, maybe a domestic dispute, or maybe there had been another fire and the police were again making the rounds.
Phil Kelley, the chief of the Parksley fire station, who lived less than a mile from Charlie and Tonya, drove past their house on his way to work the next morning and assumed the same thing.