Tonya’s interview was all but useless. Just as she hadn’t revealed much factually, she hadn’t revealed much legally. One never knew what might end up being useful in the future, though. Agar found himself latching on to the phrase “riding around.” Tonya had admitted that she and Charlie spent several nights “riding around”—she’d just never admitted to any particular destinations, or to letting Charlie out of the car. Agar kept the phrase in his pocket, figuring that trying to pin down her location would be necessary in cross-examination.
While Agar was reviewing the videos, another attorney named Carl H. Bundick (no relation, just another Bundick), was walking into his own offices less than a block away. Bundick, fifty-four, with a white buzz cut and a mustache, thought of himself as a “country lawyer,” a Swiss army knife of an attorney who handled a broad manner of petty thefts, drug possessions, land disputes, and bar brawls on behalf of the citizens who walked into his law offices on any given day. He or his assistant would typically begin the morning by checking the voice mail for new cases, and on the morning of April 2, the voice on the recording belonged to a family member of Charlie’s. She knew Carl Bundick socially and wondered if Carl would again be available to help her relative out of a patch of trouble. It wasn’t the first time. Carl had been Charlie’s attorney on record for more than a decade, scrape after scrape, relapse after relapse. He also knew Tonya a little bit, and had helped the couple navigate a lien on her house.
Carl figured out that Charlie was being held at the Accomack County Jail, and immediately placed a call to his client. “Are you okay?” he remembered asking. “Did they do a Miranda warning? What evidence do they have against you?”
Charlie remembered the interaction a little differently. He remembered reaching Carl the night before, when Carl was at his house—the sheriff’s deputies had brought Charlie to the jail and given him the number to dial. In Charlie’s version, Carl had already heard from the family member by the time Charlie called, and Charlie remembered only one part of the conversation. He remembered Carl saying, “Don’t say another word.”
He didn’t know if Carl understood that, by that point, he’d already given a confession that would fill four DVDs and print out at several hundred pages.
STATE POLICE INVESTIGATOR SCOTT WADE had come home from his interview with Tonya frustrated and exhausted and wishing he understood Tonya better. But now he would get one more chance. While Gary Agar was reviewing the confession footage, and the residents of Accomack were gossiping and crying and thinking about what they should have known, Wade was putting himself to bed for a few hours and then getting on a plane to New Jersey.
He was going to see Tonya’s sister, Anjanette. She lived about two hundred miles up the Atlantic Coast, and was Tonya’s only living immediate relative. When Wade first telephoned, Anjanette, who went by Anjee, was at the grocery store. She said it would be fine if he came to interview her, but she assumed he meant later in the week. Instead, he telephoned again a few hours later and said he was already there. He asked her to meet him at the local police precinct.
“Do you think your sister did these?” he asked her, when they sat down together.
“I don’t know,” she said. She still had friends in Accomack and had followed the arsons along with them. All that time, she had never suspected her sister—not of burning down so many strangers’ houses.
But then she started to tell him a story. A different night. A different fire.
In the middle of the night about a year ago, she’d woken up to a text message on her phone from a number she didn’t recognize. No words, just one picture of a burning house. The image was small but she thought it looked like her grandmother’s house down in Accomack. “Who is this?” she wrote to the sender, who wrote back a little later: “It’s your sister.”
Tonya and Anjee didn’t talk much and had been in only sporadic contact since their grandmother died a few years before. The estrangement was complicated, but it had to do partly with the house, which is why some murky intuition prompted Anjee to write back the way she did: “Why are you sending me a picture of the house burning? I know you burned it.”
“No,” Tonya replied, “you were the one who said you were going to come here and burn it.”
The reply had baffled Anjee. She’d never threatened anything like that—Why would she drive four hours in the middle of the night just to burn down the family homestead?—but it scared her to see the accusation in writing. Unsettled, she made a quick decision. “Don’t e-mail me,” she wrote to her sister. “Don’t call me, don’t message me, don’t contact me.”
She kept the photo, because it was the last picture she would ever have of her grandmother’s house, but she otherwise tried to forget about the incident and move on. She told herself she couldn’t really know what had happened. And also that it was just one house. One little house that nobody lived in anymore.
It was the last time she and her sister had spoken. She didn’t even know Tonya was engaged, she told Wade. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever met Charlie. She didn’t know anything about the other fires in Accomack, but if she were being honest with herself, she thought Tonya had lit the fire at their grandmother’s. It had never been solved.
Wade had asked Anjee the questions he’d come for, but found he wasn’t ready to leave. He asked whether she could add anything else. Not anything related to the investigation. Not anything that would be used in court—not anything that would help prosecute Tonya. But was there anything Anjee could tell him that might help them to understand her?
Anjee wasn’t sure how much to say. Their house had been full of secrets, the kind that Tonya had never wanted to tell Charlie. But now two of the secret keepers were dead, and one was arrested, and she alone was the person who could explain how her sister wasn’t the evil person that the rest of the county might soon claim she was.