“If she really loved you, why is she out on bond seeing another guy?” Godwin asked him. He had it on good authority that Tonya had been spotted going on dates since being released from the jail.
Charlie had no earthly idea what Godwin was talking about. He told himself it was a ploy, just them trying to get him to turn against Tonya. He told Godwin that the whole jail system and the whole county was probably corrupt.
Tonya did love him. If she didn’t, why had she recently agreed to marry him, even now, while she was free and he was in jail? Marriage seemed the prudent thing to do—they both had heard of the rule that prevented married couples from having to testify against each other in court—but also, Charlie wanted to. So now they were trying to plan a wedding, even if it wasn’t quite the wedding they’d originally had in mind. Charlie’s job had been to ask his youngest sister to procure a wedding ring and get it to Tonya.
“Make sure you get up with Sarah,” Tonya wrote him in a letter one day. “Hopefully she will do as promised.”
“So have you gotten up with Sarah yet?” she asked in another letter. “Hope she does it before my court date. If not, it will be too late.”
“I never got vows. When did you send them?” she wrote another day. Eventually, she mailed him the vows she’d written that she planned to use in a theoretical ceremony. She told him, as he remembered, that she was going to ask her lawyer whether it was possible to bring a preacher into the jail’s visitor space, to do their ceremony right there.
Would she have done any of that if she wasn’t in love with him?
The friends and family who still talked to Charlie told him he was being a fool. The whole business about marriage being for their mutual benefit didn’t make any sense. What did it matter if Tonya testified against Charlie? He’d already confessed to the crimes. The only person who would benefit from this arrangement was Tonya, who had continued to say she was innocent. That’s why she wanted the ring before her court date, people told Charlie. She didn’t want Charlie testifying against her.
“Have you asked Sarah about the ring?” she wrote again. “Don’t say I know about it,” she instructed him. His sister, she would later explain, was not Tonya’s biggest fan. She wasn’t sure if Sarah would buy the ring for her if she thought Tonya was orchestrating it.
Eventually, she would decide that the importance of getting married outweighed any fear of her future sister-in-law’s negative feelings. “Does he still want to?” she wrote in a letter directly to Charlie’s sister, trying to move the process along. “Can we get married here? What is the law on this? Because I want to, soon.”
Through all of this, Charlie sat, and he thought, and he wrote, and he called Tonya, once or twice a week as she would allow. The Accomack jail was boring, even as jails went, but he had Tonya’s letters, and she was a faithful correspondent and they were going to be married. There was so little that was certain in this world and that was certain.
One afternoon a guard came to him again and said someone wanted to talk to him. Charlie thought it might be his lawyer. But instead of leading him to the visitor’s room, the guard took him back to Todd Godwin’s office. Charlie sat again at the big desk with the front window across from the sheriff who, despite what Charlie had said in anger the last time, he actually believed to be a fair and trustworthy person. In front of him on the big desk were a pile of papers.
“Charlie, we’ve known each other a really long time,” Charlie remembered Godwin saying. “I just can’t believe you’re going to spend the rest of your life here for a girl who didn’t really love you.”
“You need to know what’s going on,” Godwin remembered telling Charlie. “She might be telling you something, but she’s got another boyfriend.”
Charlie was ready to protest again, but this time there was evidence. There was a stack of papers on Godwin’s desk, and he now slid them over to Charlie. The papers were photocopies, and the photocopies were of letters, and the letters appeared to be from Tonya. Charlie recognized her handwriting. When he read the words, he recognized her in those, too. In these letters, she talked about her favorite sexual positions and other intimate things. “Suckin’ and fuckin’,” he would later describe the content. “One asked how big the guy’s dick was.” After a few paragraphs of a few letters, he couldn’t read any more. They were love letters that Tonya had written back while she had been a prisoner in Godwin’s jail, where all correspondence could be monitored. They weren’t to Charlie. They looked to be to another inmate at another jail, someone she’d met through a prisoner pen-pal service.
“I need a cigarette,” Charlie said.
The sheriff arranged for a pack to be brought in, opening the front window so Charlie could blow smoke outside. Neither of them talked much. Charlie felt dazed.
A little while after that, Carl Bundick came to visit again, sat in front of his client and said in grave seriousness that testifying against Tonya was Charlie’s only shot. It was a possibility or even a probability that if Charlie did not cooperate, he would never be a free man again.
“It’s time to wake up,” Carl said.
For the first time, Charlie forced himself to think of what was at stake. If he didn’t cooperate with the prosecution, there was a good chance he wouldn’t see his daughter again. He wouldn’t have a chance to rebuild a new life. He wouldn’t have the chance to make amends for his old one. He would be sentenced and sent to a prison on the mainland. It would be too far and too expensive for anyone to come and visit him, and that was assuming anyone even wanted to. And while he was there, the whole time, as he turned forty, fifty, seventy, he wouldn’t have Tonya because Tonya didn’t really love him anymore. When he eventually got out, if he eventually got out, he would be alone.
So this time, when his attorney laid out the situation in the same matter-of-fact way that he had done several times before, Charlie still didn’t say anything, because saying something made it feel a little too final. But he nodded.
The love story, the one Charlie had thought was too good for him from the beginning, was now breaking into pieces. In the coming days, he would call her again, and they would talk again, and he would cry on the phone again, telling her how much he loved her again and wondering if he should tell her about the way that he’d just agreed to betray her, or that he knew about the way she’d betrayed him.
But there wouldn’t be too many of those conversations. On December 2, 2013, Tonya Bundick was arrested again and indicted on sixty-one additional counts of arson. This time she would be taken to the Eastern Shore Regional Jail down in Northampton County where they couldn’t pass any more notes. “I know you love her,” Charlie remembered his attorney saying, on the afternoon that he finally agreed to testify. “But she don’t no more give a damn about you than she does the Man in the Moon.”
CHAPTER 23
BURNED