American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

by Monica Hesse

driving across the bridge felt not so much like entering a different state but entering an interruption in the time space continuum.

Houses off Bayside Road. Houses off Seaside Road. The house on the road nobody knew the name of but that always had a goat tied up on the corner.

The investigators were willing to try anything, even open themselves up to the possibility that the entire case could hinge on an inexplicable piece of punctuation.

Local teachers and nursery owners and waitresses all heard the warnings on the radio to stay away because traffic was being diverted, and then they all got in their cars and drove precisely to the spot they had been instructed to avoid, just to see it.

(They were, in fact, distant cousins in some way neither was quite sure of.)

At one point, Charlie asked if he could smoke a cigarette. Barnes said he could, and called for somebody to bring in an ashtray. Then he called for someone to bring in a lighter. “I got a lighter,” Charlie said.

The publicity was one thing—more pressing was the fact that it might be impossible to seat a jury where one or more members didn’t own something that had burned.

Charlie and Tonya together had felt, to Charlie at least, like an epic love story. But by the end it was a mess, and maybe it always had been.

So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.

He watched me head off to Accomack with the dog and the car, to go live in a county where my cell phone worked only sporadically.