As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and we pass it down to generations. One afternoon in Accomack, I drove to the Barrier Islands Center, an old house (an “almshouse,” actually, a place where the poor and the mentally ill used to be sent to live and labor) that has been converted to a museum exploring life on the old Eastern Shore. I watched a short documentary about Hog Island, a community off the coast that once had its own culture and its own traditions, but then was forced to disband when the waters got too high. The documentary was full of people nostalgically talking about how it no longer exists. The island had been unpopulated for eighty years by the time of the documentary’s making, but the tone was still wistful, even though all of the living interviewees were people who had left the island as babies.
But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.
In the end, the grandest sweeping statement I can make about Accomack is this: There were buildings that burned down. Some of the buildings that burned down had meant something to people, and their burning was a tragedy. Some of the buildings that burned down were ugly and old. Nobody knew who they even belonged to and why they were still there. Those buildings weren’t missed. A normal person wouldn’t have burned them down, but the fact that Charlie and Tonya did—well, that wasn’t the worst thing in the world, either. And the people who really made the county, the firefighters and teachers and librarians and police officers, they were all still there. That mattered.
TWO TRIALS WERE OVER and there were as many as sixty left to go. It seemed almost incredible to the residents of Accomack County that they could still be so far from completion. The houses that had burned down began to be reclaimed by the land, with grass and vines growing over the broken structures.
Tonya hadn’t broken. She hadn’t asked for a plea deal, despite the guilty verdict with the second case. What she did do was fire Allan Zaleski. “To Whom It May Concern,” she wrote in neat cursive on a page of notebook paper addressed to the courthouse. “I am writing to find out the proper procedure for having your public defender removed from your case. I don’t find the legal advice I am given to be in my best interest.” While Judge Tyler was considering her request, there was also the matter of her sentencing. Charlie still hadn’t been sentenced. Tonya had received a sentencing recommendation from jurors in her second trial, in which she had been found guilty, but the judge needed to affirm those recommendations. He also had to sentence her for the first trial, in which she had submitted a last-minute Alford plea.
On the morning of her sentencing, a brisk day in April 2014—over a year since her first arrest—Judge Tyler explained what he’d been thinking as he’d mulled over Tonya’s punishment. It was true, the judge said, that sometimes the court gave more leniency to felons who had pleaded guilty. That was because a guilty plea, submitted ahead of time, relieved the Commonwealth of the burden and expense of a trial. Criminals were rewarded for that. But this is not what had happened on this occasion, he said. Tonya had pleaded guilty only at the end of a costly and inconvenient trial.
Because of this, he planned on following the method he’d established for sentencing over a long career on the bench. If he had a repeat offender in his court, “I just simply look at what their jail time was last time and double it,” he explained. Therefore, because the previous jury had recommended a sentence of three-and-a-half years for the charge in which Tonya was found guilty, he would impose a sentence of seven years for the one in which she’d submitted an Alford plea. He wanted the sentences to run consecutively.
That meant the total time she would spend in prison, for just two out of her sixty-odd charges, would be more than a decade.
While Tonya stood impassively, not reacting at all to the judgment that had just been placed, Tyler said that there was one more piece of business to deal with. Tonya had written a letter requesting a new attorney. Did she still want that?
“Yes,” she said.
Okay, then, he said. He would have a new attorney appointed for her, and that new attorney could take her through the rest of her trials.
ELSEWHERE, as the court proceedings continued:
A proposal to build eighty-four new chicken houses was brought forth to the county, and Accomack began debating its past and its future. Were big, modern farms the pathway to rebuilding the shore’s financial success? Were they a temporary solution that would ruin the land? The county began planning town halls, to which hundreds of neighbors would come and listen to environmentalists and chicken executives, and argue, and watch slide show presentations debating the merits and downfalls of chicken poop.
The Tasley Volunteer Fire Department, which had long ago come to the conclusion that it was time to upgrade from their old, out-of-date space, began searching for a plot of land on which to build a new station. Ultimately, they chose a lot right across from the now burned-down Whispering Pines resort, big enough to hold a three-bay, modern station with modern equipment. Jeff Beall decided not to run for chief of the Tasley department the following year. He knew people didn’t blame him for the fires, but he was the guy whose roster Charlie had been on, and that knowledge weighed on him. There was some infighting in the station about which direction the department should go, and several members ended up leaving. One of those members was Bryan Applegate. It didn’t have anything to do with his brother, he told people. He was just looking for a change of scenery so he started running with the company in Onancock.
Of the Virginia State Police investigators who had worked the case, Scott Wade and Rob Barnes stayed in their same jobs with their same titles. Glenn Neal, who was deeply affected by the knowledge that the arsonist had been his friend, ended up leaving the investigative branch of the police. He went back to being a highway trooper. He was happier that way.
After the arsonists were caught, nobody had much need for an Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters T-shirt anymore. The ones that had already been purchased—sometimes people would still wear them while doing yard work or washing the car, but it wasn’t with the same sense of civic pride as during the arsons. It was more of a memento of a weird time in everyone’s lives, or a talisman from a shared experience. ESAH founder Matt Hart ended up donating the leftovers to a nonprofit and heard that those somehow ended up at a homeless shelter in north Philadelphia.
Jon Cromer, the police profiler who had questioned Tonya on the night of her arrest, would silently add her to the mental list of prisoners he hoped would one day talk to him about what they’d done and why they’d done it. He thought that he would learn a lot from her.
CHAPTER 28
“IT’S OVER”