Eleven years before, when Beall and his wife, Renee, planned their relocation to the shore after decades of more cosmopolitan posts, Renee, a special education teacher, came in the middle of the summer with their two sons while Beall finished up work back in New York. Beall had found the house earlier, and when Renee saw it in person, she was amused. In every relocation with the Coast Guard, Beall had volunteered with fire companies. It was how he found community. In Accomack, he had yet again chosen a house less than two minutes from the local station. Within a few years he was the chief.
The other thing that had amused Renee was how driving across the bridge felt not so much like entering a different state but entering an interruption in the time space continuum. The small towns, small roads, everyone up in one another’s business with small gossip—it felt like the 1950s to her. When Beall started with Tasley, he discovered this time warp carried over to the fire department, too. They were still running fires out of the same building they’d used in 1926, back when eighteen Tasley men had pooled $5 or $20 apiece “for the purpose of a chemical engine,” according to the handwritten records of the time. The top floor meeting room perpetually smelled like mildew, and the bottom floor truck bays—designed for hand-drawn fire engines, not motorized ones—were filled with junk. The modern equipment was kept in a newer building next door. And then there was the question of Beall’s roster. Some of the older members had been trained not at formal academies but through osmosis, watching their fathers and grandfathers. Memberships at places like Tasley’s Volunteer Fire Department went back generations. When Beall wanted something done or something changed, he communicated it in a way that was meant to be frank and direct, but which came across to some of the old heads as insulting. He said “friggin’ ” a lot, perpetuating regular debate as to whether the word should constitute a quarter in the company swear jar. There was a tiny chasm in the group, between people who appreciated the way Beall was trying to modernize and professionalize the department, and people who thought that Beall, a Come Here, had no respect for tradition.
But this was all behind the scenes. When a fire came, they pulled together and ran. Tonight, all around the county, firefighters were running. The crew from Bloxom had left the fire on Dennis Drive and immediately been called to the one at Helen Hasty’s. The crew from Parksley had been called out again, too.
At Parksley, Phil Kelley, like Shannon, was realizing that it was going to be one of those nights, a night where things went wonky; a series of tossed cigarette butts and failed cooking experiments also conspired against the firefighters of Accomack County. But as he drove to his next fire and listened to the types of incidents people were calling in, things started to seem more than regular busy. They started to seem just plain weird. The county was geographically big, but all of these fires were fairly close together. What were the chances of that?
While Kelley crossed the railroad tracks, he kept thinking about Baghdad. When the first Gulf War began, the news kept running clip after clip of the bombing of Baghdad. On television the whole sky looked orange from the light of the buildings that had been hit and gone up in flames. He hadn’t been able to picture what that would look like in person. But now, while he was driving toward the reddened sky to get to his fire, he looked north and saw that the sky was red in a different place, too. Multiple big fires, all going at once, in a way he’d never seen before. He thought his county looked a little bit like Baghdad.
Kelley had a friend who ran with the Bloxom Fire Department just up the road. He pulled out his cell phone to call him. “Do you have an abandoned house fire going on up there?” Kelley asked.
“Yep,” the friend said. “What do you got going on?”
“Two house fires,” Kelley said. When he hung up the phone he was still thinking. The other number he called was Glenn Neal. Neal was a special agent with the Virginia State Police. He was classified as general assignment, but he and his colleague Rob Barnes had both been specifically trained in fire and bomb investigations—it had been the most pressing need of the VSP at the time they each graduated. It was Neal’s and Barnes’s jobs to determine the cause of any fires set in the county. Tonight Neal was the one on duty. “Do you know about what’s going on here?” Kelley remembering asking when Neal answered his call.
“We’re on top of it,” Neal said, and hung up the phone.
Houses catch on fire; it doesn’t always mean anything. It wasn’t unusual for an abandoned house or two to burn down every year. But this had been three in one night. To everyone involved, it was beginning to feel off. It felt, as Jeff Beall would later describe it to friends, like a person arriving home at the end of the day and finding windows open at his house. One open window, and a person might assume that his spouse had done it to air out the kitchen after a cooking mishap. But if all of the windows were open, it became something else, something eerie and malicious.
Fire number four: an abandoned house in Greenbush, called into the 911 Center just twenty-three hours after the first one on Dennis Drive.
Fire number five: an abandoned house in Parksley, called in one hour after fire number four by a man who had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and heard a bunch of crackles. He looked up and, he told the 911 dispatcher, “All I saw was orange in the sky.”
Fire number six: an abandoned house in Hallwood, an hour after fire number five.
At each site, there had been no reports of prowlers or unusual activity, no outward reason for the houses to catch fire. Someone had come in and gone out, and left nothing at all behind.
Six fires.
The first fire had been lit less than thirty hours ago. All around Accomack people were coming to the same conclusion, which they thought to themselves or said to one another.
Kelley had said it to his friend in Bloxom, and Shannon and Richie had said it to each other, and when Neal and Barnes, the investigators, got to the scenes of the burned-out houses and began to pick through the unidentifiable chunks of old house, they would say it to each other. And now on November 13, Jeff Beall, at the end of a long stretch of fires that felt like someone had thrown open all of the windows of his home and left it naked and vulnerable to invaders—he said it, too: “We’ve got an arsonist.”