The matter of love was proving difficult for Carl Bundick, who wanted to get the best situation possible for his client. Carl was, as his last name suggested, a Born Here, who had left the shore only to get a bachelor’s and a law degree. He’d once run for Commonwealth’s attorney against Gary Agar, but after being defeated, set up his private practice in a converted colonial house filled with ramshackle antiques and dusty candy bowls. Now, the issue at hand was this: While Charlie had eventually implicated Tonya in his confession, he hadn’t fully grasped what that would mean. In his mind, he’d done it as a means of explaining the fires. The police wanted to know if they’d caught all of the perpetrators, or if the arsons would keep going. Charlie wanted them to know that if they had caught him, and if they had caught Tonya, then there wouldn’t be any more fires.
Now Charlie was realizing the implications of that confession. The police and lawyers wouldn’t let him just volunteer to take the blame and have it be over. The lawyers wanted her put away, too, and they wanted him to help them do that. They wanted him to testify against her. Carl was pushing it hard, telling Charlie it would be good for him. How good, he couldn’t say. Gary Agar hadn’t approached Charlie’s attorney with any specific kind of deal, for two reasons: one, he knew that sentencing would ultimately be up to a judge, not him. And two, he knew that if Tonya did go to trial, juries tended not to trust witnesses whose testimonies they felt had been bought and paid for. It was better for Charlie to be able to testify and say, truthfully, that he hadn’t been offered anything specific in return.
So all that Charlie knew was that the maximum sentence for his crimes was up to 584 years—lifetimes of incarceration. And that he still loved Tonya.
Loving Tonya was more easily navigable than one might have imagined in the Accomack County Jail. The building was a small structure attached to the sheriff’s office. It had only a hundred beds and a kitchen that seemed, to inmates, incapable of producing anything but bologna sandwiches. Occasionally, inmates wrote letters to the local newspaper to complain about other issues with the jail: the paint was peeling, they said. It was small and crowded. There weren’t any activities or programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, to keep the inmates (who ranged from shoplifters to drunk drivers to murderers) minimally occupied. Before Charlie and Tonya arrived, the jail’s most famous inhabitant had been a man named Richard Godwin—no relation to the sheriff—an insurance and real estate mini-tycoon who preferred going by “Wrendo Johnson Periless Godwin” and was the Eastern Shore’s only presidential candidate to date, in the 2008 election. Wrendo Johnson Periless Godwin’s seventy thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benz had accrued multiple overdue speeding tickets, but the candidate decided that it was more important for him to keep on the campaign trail than to make his court date. Eventually, he was sentenced to ten days in the jail, and afterward told the Salisbury Daily Times that the place was in “severe” trouble. “You could hardly get to the bathroom,” he said, explaining that one night there were five inmates in his holding cell. (He eventually withdrew from the presidential campaign.)
Charlie knew the jail—it was where he’d spent time while awaiting sentencing for his previous crimes. The men and women were housed separately. But since the jail was small, and because there were windows that abutted the recreation yard where inmates walked around a weather-beaten flagpole, there were ways of getting in touch with other prisoners of the opposite sex.
After Charlie had been there several weeks, he heard someone outside of his cell window. The voice belonged to Tonya, he says. She was out for her fresh-air break, and the guard didn’t seem to be paying any attention.
It was the first time they’d spoken to each other since the night of the arrest.
In a whispered conversation in a miserable prison yard, she told him he knew what he had to do: he had to take responsibility for the fires—all of them. He had to explain to the police that he’d been on drugs when he gave his confession, and that’s why he had implicated Tonya, right? Because he knew she didn’t have anything to do with it, right? And that’s what he needed to tell the police. The right story, the true story.
He believed he understood what she was doing—communicating to him what she wanted him to do in a way that would be unimpeachable to anyone listening. He didn’t blame her for it. She had two kids who needed her: the younger was currently living with the boys’ father but the older was in foster care. The only person who needed Charlie right now was Tonya, and what she needed was for him to tell everyone that she had nothing to do with the fires.
Mostly, as they talked through the prison wall, he just told her how much he loved her.
After that first time in the prison yard, there were ways of staying in contact. There were cell mates to be whispered to who could pass messages. There was a small library shelf, and there were ways of sharing which book to look in for a letter, and there was the flagpole at one end of the miserable exercise yard. Inmates in some generation past had figured out that this pole made a serviceable landmark to bury notes near. This information had trickled down as general knowledge for the rest of the population. The preferred method was to write tiny notes in tiny handwriting, and then fold the paper up between two pieces of the plastic cutlery that was passed out with the bologna sandwiches, and then plunge the cutlery into the ground.
There was a different method that Charlie liked to use, which seemed appropriate given Tonya’s propensity for lip balm: he took a ChapStick container, sliced off a thin circle from the top of the balm, and discarded the rest. Into the mostly hollowed-out container, he rolled notes, some written in numeric code. Charlie wrote to Tonya this way, and Tonya wrote back. They passed messages about what their lawyers had said, and what they thought might happen and about how, despite everything, they were still deeply in love.
“You’re my Tiny Toot and I love you and I never want to lose you,” Charlie wrote. “I’m already scared if I get too much time, I’ll lose you. Sometimes I don’t think you really know just how much I love you. I’d rather die than lose you. I can’t picture life without you.”
Shortly after that, toward the end of September 2013, with money Charlie was never quite sure how she or anyone she knew had scraped together, Tonya was released on bond. She continued to write him letters from the outside. “Do they know that we didn’t do this?” she wrote. “Did you tell them about your drug use since your mom died?”
She was a good pen pal. He called her collect once a week. How could he agree to testify against her, when it was his fault they were trying to prosecute her to begin with? If he had just kept his mouth shut, everything would be fine. His lawyer didn’t know Tonya like he did. Gary Agar didn’t know Tonya like he did. They didn’t know how sweet and loving she could be.
But it was all confusing. One day a deputy came to his cell and told him that the sheriff wanted to see him. Charlie was escorted from the rear part of the building, where the cells were, up to the front, where Godwin’s office was just off the lobby and overlooked a parking lot. Charlie sat down on the visitor side of Godwin’s big wooden desk, and Godwin got straight to the point.