“Central to Chief 7,” said the dispatcher. “You are now forty-five minutes into your incident. I got one fresh body coming to you, that’s all I got.”
The uniforms and equipment that each firefighter wore totaled more than one hundred pounds, and Kelley was starting to feel it. He hesitated before answering the dispatcher: “It’s under control.”
The fire had finally reached its turning point. Kelley could tell that the mist rising from the house was no longer smoke, but water evaporating as it hit the hot parts of the wood. This was called “steam conversion,” and it was how a firefighter knew that he’d reached the seed of the fire and that the fire was almost dead. At any fire, one of the last puzzle pieces to click into place for Kelley was the moment when he stood in front of a house and watched smoke become steam. Now, on Dennis Drive, there was just smoldering embers, charred wood, and ash, and firefighters sweating in their gear, bone weary in a way that the joggers among them would say was closer to marathon exhaustion than wind sprints.
The nice old house was gone. The owner, it would later turn out, had moved to a nursing home and died three years before. Her belongings had all been left behind. The house had been full of them, and they were now scattered in the grass. Papers, clothing, broken dolls, and hardcover books with titles like The World Since 1914, a 1933 edition.
With the fire put out, there was no light but the headlamps from the trucks. The firefighters walked the perimeter of the scene, as they did with all fires, making sure that there were no remaining embers, nothing to catch on the nearby trees or to send a fire to the houses across the field. Again, they saw nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. When all of that patrolling was done, Kelley, who never did end up eating his birthday cake, radioed in his last update from the scene at nearly one in the morning of November 13: “Terminating command.”
MEANWHILE, around the county on the night of November 12:
The sheriff was home with his pager resting on the nightstand, where he left it most nights so he could be awakened in case of emergencies.
The Commonwealth’s attorney was at home, preparing for an odd case involving a drunk Navy SEAL.
The ATF and the FBI and the other agencies whose personnel would eventually descend on the county were home, too, but their homes were far away and they were unaware, as of yet, that Accomack even existed.
The regular citizens of the area were quietly doing regular things. Lois Gomez was asleep, preparing for another shift at Perdue, where she would package goose-bumped chicken thighs and wings from a fast-moving conveyor belt, thousands of chickens every day. Helen Hasty was awake, irritated that her dog kept barking, but chalking it up to his age and increasing senility.
Charles Smith, a body shop owner who did precise work at fair prices, who had a self-effacing frankness that most people found endearing—Charlie had lit the fire. But nobody knew that yet, and they wouldn’t for a long time.
The firefighters of Accomack County would be called out two more times that night. They would be called out eighty-six times total over the next five months.
The county would grow used to hearing the wail of sirens in the middle of the night, the sound of engines and tankers crunching over gravel. The county would see landmarks go up in flames and neighbors eye one another with suspicion at the grocery store. At night, the roads would transform into a sea of checkpoints and cop cars; citizens trying to get home while Accomack turned into a police state and the county lit up around them. The county went about its business. The county burned down.
Some residents would eventually decide that they needed to take matters into their own hands, and they would form vigilante groups and buy binoculars and guns. Some residents would grow to think, as Deborah Clark did, that this all signified the beginning of the apocalypse and the world must be coming to an end.
CHAPTER 2
“THE SOUTH STARTS HERE”
THE EASTERN SHORE OF VIRGINIA is a hangnail, a hinky peninsula separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay and a few hundred years of cultural isolation. It is long and narrow, stretching only fourteen miles at its widest spot but covering hundreds of square miles altogether. The northern border is Maryland at a gas station called Dixieland, which sells Confederate flags and tchotchkes and overstuffed hoagies, and marks the entrance to Accomack with a big sign reading “The South Starts Here.” The southern border is the twenty-five-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, built in 1964 as a triumph of modern transportation, which connects the shore to the mainland for the cost of $12 each way. In between are little towns, clapboard churches, peeling chicken coops, salt-whipped brush, and roads that go miles and miles between streetlights.
The shore is old. It is mostly rural. It is a place that the state senator, Lynwood Lewis, likes to think of as a seventy-mile-long small town where everybody knows everybody, and a place where agricultural traditions convinced the state representative, Robert Bloxom, that when he left the shore for college in the 1980s, he would do so carrying a fifty-pound sack of potatoes along with his suitcase. His grandfather had been a potato farmer, and potatoes had built the shore. Potatoes, but also the railroad, and also a collection of old, old families with names like Bloxom and Lewis and Bundick and Doughty, and a few other shore names that separated the “Born Heres” from the “Come Heres.”
The Born Heres were exactly what they sounded like. They were people whose roots went way back in the registers of the Accomack and Northampton courthouses, which had some of the oldest ongoing census records of anywhere in the United States. The Come Heres were recent transplants, many of them folks who had fled Philadelphia or Baltimore in search of cheap waterfront property. They, in a shorthand description provided by one Born Here, organized international film nights and bought their coffee at the independent Book Bin instead of at a Royal Farms gas station. One could easily assess a neighbor’s longevity on the Eastern Shore via a short conversation: those whose families went back generations tended to have dense Tidewater accents—“oh’s” became “ow’s,” and “ow’s” became “oo’s.”
A Come Here, even one who had been raised on the shore since toddlerhood, could never hope to be thought of as a Born Here. After putting in several decades, they might eventually gain the status of a Been Here, but only maybe.