“We had left my house, I guess it was probably around 6 o’clock because I was going to go birthday shopping for my boys,” she explained. “Their birthdays were going to be April 3 and April 9. So I wanted to get their birthday gifts, so we had gone to the Walmart in Pocomoke.” Her sons wanted smartphones for their birthdays. The ones in the Walmart electronics department were more expensive than the $300 she’d allotted, so they tried a nearby GameStop, and Family Dollar, and then they went back to Walmart, which had turned out to have the best deal after all. Before they checked out, she and Charlie decided they needed a few groceries. “So when we got into the grocery section—mind you, I was the one, I was buying the items that night, I was the one who had the money—and Charlie wanted a box of Steak-umms. And to make a long story short, when we would use his money to go to the grocery store, everything had to be bought as a meal. You know, everything had to be a meal. And he picked up these Steak-umms and he said he wanted to get those and he was going to take them home and fix them. And, of course, I’m like, but you can’t do that because everything has to be a meal. You know, we’re planning our money out. We have to get enough to make meals that will last. So we got in an argument over a box of Steak-umms.”
Tonya kept talking, and what she was talking about suddenly wasn’t a story about the night that the fires stopped and her life changed in Accomack County. It had become a story about relationships, and those nights when the person you love is suddenly the person who irritates you most, and when Steak-umms grow to represent not a dinner choice, but the symbol of financial independence, and finally getting it together to move up in the world.
Tonya’s story was about a waning love affair, and the relentless struggle of being alive and working class in 2013.
She made him put the Steak-umms back. She was touchy. He was touchy. They left the Walmart, Charlie driving, and they were supposed to stop to make a car payment at a nearby auto center but Charlie didn’t even stop the car. They got closer to their house, but then before they could turn onto their street, Charlie turned to her and asked if she wanted to go down to Onley, to a different Walmart. She thought maybe he wanted to get his own presents for her sons. He hadn’t gotten anything for them at the other stores.
“So we went—we got back to my house because I wanted to check on the boys and make sure they were okay, put the groceries away, and we proceeded to go down to the Onley Walmart. And when we got there, things still weren’t right,” Tonya said. She went to look in the underwear section and he was right there, glued to her elbow, the way he used to be glued to her in her own clothing store, only this time it wasn’t cute and it wasn’t endearing. “And I mean I won’t lie. I was a little irate with him. So I was like, ‘Do you have to be up my ass while I’m looking—excuse me—while I’m looking at underwear?’ ”
They left the second Walmart. They drove a while, stopped at The Wine Rack to get gas. Tonya told Charlie that he seemed like he was in a bad mood that night and that he didn’t want to be there with her. It had been a hard stretch of time for them, she said, with his mom passing away and business being rough. She offered him an out. She said, “You know, if things are too hard for you to deal with with my sons—if things are too hard for you to deal with, just tell me. You know, all you got to do is walk.”
After they got gas, Charlie said he wanted to ride around for a while. A bit later, he stopped and peed and then asked Tonya if she could drive. She drove a little more, through the back roads of Melfa, and then he asked to stop and be let out again. She didn’t bother to ask why; she was already pissed at him. She eventually doubled back and tried calling his cell, but he didn’t pick up.
“And did he call you then?” Allan asked.
“He called me a little while later.”
“All right. And what did he say?”
“Well, at first when he picked up the phone, I didn’t hear anything. It was just a lot of muffling,” she said. “It sounded like somebody was holding the phone in their pocket or something.”
“But then what happened?”
“And then he just told me—he said, ‘Come back and get me.’ ”
“When he first got out of the van, did he have anything in his hands?” Allan asked, angling at whether Tonya would have seen him carrying a lighter or anything that indicated what he was about to go do.
“No.”
“When he got back in the van, did he have anything in his hands?”
“No.”
“And so then did he ever mention to you anything about, ‘We’ve been caught,’ or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Did you see any other traffic on the road?”
“I did not,” Tonya said.
“Okay. So after he got back in the van, what happened?”
“I got to the Melfa light, and a car came up behind me and I had to stop because the light was red; and when I proceeded to make my left-hand turn when the light turned green, there was the cops. I mean, they came out of everywhere.”
She didn’t know Charlie was going to light the fire. She didn’t know he had lit any fires. She didn’t know anything about the fires, she said. What she knew is that Charlie was the type of guy who acted “sporadic,” who would leave the house to pick up bread and then get to the grocery store and forget why he was there. She thought he might be back on drugs. Everybody knew Charlie had a drug problem. Those nights when Charlie was out lighting fires, she assumed he was working late, trying to bring in extra cash for a business that didn’t seem to be going well since he’d moved out of his stepdad’s shop. That’s what she knew.
Gary Agar approached his cross-examination with an air of disbelief.
“Now, you’re very articulate,” he said. “You speak very well. How much education do you have?”
“I graduated high school,” she said.
“And then Charles had low esteem, he always needed assurances, and you were his girlfriend.”
“Yes.”
“And did you give him those assurances?”
“Well, of course. I loved him.”
For the jury who had just seen Charlie bumble through his testimony and not understand some of the terminology, Agar was trying to illustrate one of his central theses: Tonya was the dominant partner in the relationship. Charlie depended on her, for everything from a place to live to the building of his own self-esteem. He might have been the one caught with a lighter, but if there was an orchestrated plot behind the actions, it would have been orchestrated by Tonya.
Agar tried to bring her to the concept of “riding around” that he had noted in her interrogation with Scott Wade. Hadn’t she told Wade that she and Charlie went out riding around a few times a week? How was it possible that she wouldn’t have been aware of Charlie’s fire-starting proclivities, if she was in the car with him so much? He brought up the prison phone calls, the fact that when she and Charlie talked on the phone while she was out on bond and he was in the county jail, she had made a point to say, “They’re recording this.” (She hadn’t wanted to discuss the case, she explained.) He brought up their prison letters, and the fact that Tonya sounded like she was pretty good at tracking down legal information online. (“I wouldn’t say that. I know how to go online and Google something.”)
He wasn’t expecting to get a sudden courtroom confession, and he didn’t. Tonya was poised and collected, never displaying a negative emotion stronger than slight irritation. She had good comedic timing. When Agar asked what she’d made of the fact that Charlie—who by her account had already asked to pee once—asked to be let out again, she sighed in a way that anyone familiar with the daily exasperations of a relationship could relate to: “You know what? I really didn’t ask him anything because we were already not getting along.”
And then she did let him out, and she did pick him up, and the police arrested them, she explained again to Agar. And then she went to jail and was put in solitary confinement and for several weeks she had no idea what Charlie was saying about her or anything else.
“Had you been trying to train him?” Agar asked one final time.