~~ ~~
After Tom and the kids tackled her in a group hug, Tom said, “I was about to go look for you. Why didn’t you call? It’s a disposable phone, and no one is looking for us anyway.”
“I misplaced the phone.”
Tom laughed. He knew how often she misplaced things. “I’m glad you’re home.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead and pried Rebecca from her death grip around Serena’s waist. “Let Mommy take her coat off.”
Serena draped her slightly damp coat over a kitchen chair and all of them sat around the table. Carrie had made sugar cookies earlier that afternoon and Rebecca had decorated one especially for her, a heart shaped cookie with French vanilla frosting and red candy sprinkles. Tom had both wine and coffee on hand, not knowing which one she would want. Samuel had learned a new song on his guitar to play for her homecoming. Cookies, beverages and music were offered to her all at once. After the flurry of excitement died down, the kids went to bed while the adults lingered in the kitchen for a few minutes longer.
There they sat, knowing their actions were irreversible. Two days ago Tom had finished up his last day of work – not that his boss, or any of his co-workers, knew it was his last day. He made sure that he worked a regular full day, with nothing in his attitude showing what he was up to. Meanwhile, he had been making preparations for weeks. He sold personal items using anonymous online auctions, stockpiling all the cash he could. He thought it was very unlikely that anyone would look for them, or that anyone would look into their “deaths” very deeply. Still, he was careful.
He was fairly confident that the house fire would be ruled an accident without a second thought. He had made sure that the gasoline container was staged to look as if he had been working on repairing a broken snow blower and made the tragic mistake of using the mud room as a workshop. The mud room was attached to the living space of the house. If the fire spread as they imagined it would, it was only a matter of time before the house fire created by the fallen candle in the living room would spread to the mud room, igniting the open drum of gasoline. Their only concern was that the fire needed to reach the gas before someone noticed the fire and called 911. Some of their plans were entirely out of their control, but they had a good feeling it would all work out.
From the beginning of their adventure, when Serena had been up all night looking things up on the Internet, things had fallen neatly into place. It only took a single phrase typed into a search engine (“Help me disappear”) for Serena to find an underground society, known as the off-the-grid network. Next, she looked up the term “off-the-grid”, and found a reference for people who wanted to live independently of public utilities, go green, and have less dependency on government. But extremists going off-the-grid, or just “off-grid”, wanted to hide from the government; most likely for paranoid reasons, or to breed a militia clan. While the latter sounded scary, off-grid groups helped their members fall off the radar.
Serena posted a message to the off-grid forum, and within ten minutes heard back from a spokesperson from Off-grid-ghost, a grassroots organization which sounded like a human smuggling ring. Tom joined the group too, and by the end of the week, they’d both told their story. Off-grid-ghost immediately offered them a house where they could hide, an old farm house on a leftover slice of Minnesota farm land, completely obscured from the road. All they wanted in return was $10,000 cash and an agreement to keep their organization secret. Rent was to be paid through Off-grid-ghost: landlord and tenant were forbidden to know each other, although both were required to be members of the network.
The house was selected because records of the dwelling and property were from so long ago that no one would find them without knowing exactly what to look for, and maybe not even then. Archived paper records were often lost or destroyed from the perils of long term storage, and no one had bothered to go back far enough to digitize the records. Chances were good that there was no trace of this house existing, which qualified the location for endorsement by Off-grid-ghost, said their spokesman.
So far, everything was going according to plan, but Tom and Serena were both nervous about falling in with a radical organization like Off-grid-ghost. Yet what choice did they have if they didn’t know how to disappear on their own?
It was only because they were computer savvy that they were able to learn about the underground off-the-grid network; and that was where their escape-plotting skills ended. They had no current passports and there wasn’t enough time to obtain them. They didn’t know what else to do, so they turned to what was, in their minds, a whack-job fringe group to help them hide. Tom and Serena considered themselves to be normal people, who just happened to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. How could they explain their actions in a way that would not make them look crazy?
The off-grid plan was the only plan they had, so they had to trust that it would work. They weren’t even sure what to wish for: was it better if nothing bad happened, and they messed up their lives for no reason? Or was it better to be “right”, and not crazy? How could it be that two college educated people from suburbia would be so paranoid as to stage their deaths so that they could hide from their own government, dragging their three children with them?
They could analyze this over and over, but in the end they had only two choices: ignore the warning they believed to be true, or comply with what the government wanted. Always people of action when they believed in something, they felt they had no other option. So even though they knew very little about Minnesota, they committed to the plan right away. It was a place to hide. Hide and wait to see what would happen.