“You could say anything to him and he would laugh,” Tonya says. “His smile would just light up his face.”

Her father was a hard man, but her mother, who had studied to be a nurse before having children, was loving. Tonya liked to read her mother’s old textbooks as a young girl, and she took her certified nursing assistant courses while still in high school.

As Tonya got older, she grew into her looks. Her face was fine-boned, almost Nefertiti-like. She put highlights in her thick brown hair and wore meticulously applied eyeliner. She was 5-foot-6 with a figure that was long-limbed and large-busted. She would dance on tables when out weekly at Shuckers, which wasn’t unusual for the establishment, but sometimes she’d do it even when nobody else was.

On one of the nights that Kelly Rose, a Shuckers waitress, first met Tonya, she walked into the bar wearing nothing but a bra and underwear beneath her trench coat. “Wow, I got the same outfit at home, but I must do it wrong,” Rose joked to a co-worker, “because I wear clothes over the top.” People noticed Tonya.

Privately, Tonya always thought of herself as a homebody. She liked to read novels, she liked to be in with her boys. “She kept to herself,” an old boyfriend says. She was a showy introvert, a private exhibitionist.

But on the night of that first date with Charlie, a set-up by mutual friends, they both opened up, talking for hours in the parking lot. He told her about his troubled past. She told him about her kids. She loved how easygoing he seemed, and the way he laughed. “You could say anything to him and he would laugh,” Tonya says. “His smile would just light up his face.”

Charlie moved in with Tonya, to the white bungalow she shared with her sons in Parksley. In the same building that Charlie opened his garage, Tonya opened a business of her own, selling clothing in the front office area. She named the store “A Tiny Taste of Toot,” after the pet name her father called her. Charlie, Tonya remembers, would hang out in her store more than in his portion of the building, until finally she would have to shoo him away, explaining that women didn’t like shopping for clothes around a man covered in dust and car paint.

They seemed very in love. “Lovey-dovey, I guess you’d call it,” says James Kline, who knew them and would see them in public. They shared a Facebook account, and sometimes Charlie logged on to leave her public messages. “It’s Char,” he commented on a close-up of Tonya. “Not only are you the best and I love you, your the most beautiful girl in the whole damn world.”

One afternoon in the spring or summer of 2012, before the arsons, they went for lunch at the Sage Diner. Charlie was fidgety, leaving the restaurant to pace around outside. Tonya wondered if something was wrong, but when he returned to the table, his words came out in a jumble. “I have something to ask you,” she remembers him saying. Will you marry me?

She dressed up as the Easter Bunny for a children’s celebration. They both dressed up for Halloween, as vampires. Their acquaintance Seth Matthews took a few photos of them in costume, and when Tonya saw them, she asked if he would photograph their wedding. He warned her that he was no professional, but agreed to anyway for $250.

In March 2013, Tonya posted on her clothing store’s Facebook page that she would be closing for a few months to focus on planning the wedding. She was hoping it could be in May, if they could get money together. Their colors would be blue and silver.

Later that month, Charlie told Wayne Wessels that he wished he knew who was responsible for the arsons. He said that he had half a mind to find a passed-out junkie, drive him to an abandoned building and plant a lighter on him, just to collect the $25,000 in reward money. Wessels thought the joke was out of character and in poor taste but chalked it up to the stress the whole county was feeling.

Charlie was under stress, because Charlie was the one setting the fires. He says Tonya was, too. He says they were Tonya’s idea.