After talking to Josh on Saturday morning, George had left Allison in the car and walked to the small convenience store. She could see him on his cell phone. A couple minutes later he got back in the passenger side and picked up a small pack he’d left on the floor. “We’ll leave your car in a safe place. Head back south a mile and a half. I’ll tell you when to turn.” Allison did as he asked and when they reached the point in the freeway, George had her turn off onto what looked like a driveway heading down into the woods. Another turn into a dirt road and the spacing of the trees on either side thickened. Four more turns and 1.2 miles according to the odometer, and they were driving on mossy earth, on what was more trail than road. George had her stop next to a beautiful, seventy-five foot tree with bushy green branches all the way to the top. While they were driving, George had pulled a small device that looked like a CD-player from his pack and affixed it just below the passenger window. They got out of the car and Allison was surprised by how much the air had warmed compared to just a couple miles away at Gorman. She watched George go to a spot where the brush was particularly thick. She called out to him:
“I’ve got a bunch of stuff, George. I won’t be able to carry it very far.”
George didn’t answer. When he reached the brush, he pulled away several large branches, revealing a Hummer painted in camouflage. He pulled a key out of his pack and the muted “whoop-whoop” of the alarm being turned off sounded out of place in the middle of the forest. He popped the trunk and began to transfer the lode from the BMW to his vehicle. Allison smiled to herself; George had always wanted a Hummer.
Once everything was transferred to George’s car, alongside what looked like boxes of groceries from Costco that George already had in the back, they closed up the BMW. Just before shutting the passenger door of the BMW, he pressed a button on the device he had attached below the window and Allison could see a green light blinking.
“If any seal on the car is broken – window, door, roof, anything – it will detect it and send me a signal on my cell phone. We’ll know if they’ve found you.”
Two weeks ago, Allison might have snorted and poked fun at a comment like that. Now she wasn’t so sure. They got in the Hummer and George began to navigate slight openings in the forest that didn’t even qualify as trails. Surreal as it was, Allison felt comforted. She caught him up on the events of her life while George navigated between trees and over several small streams. He seemed particularly interested in the divorce proceedings, not just because it meant Allison was single again (she managed to not roll her eyes at the idea that this meant he was going to try to start “dating” her while holed up in the middle of nowhere) but because it also provided a launching pad for his theory about how her ex-husband must have been a corporate mole and part of a larger effort to undermine the independence of…Allison stopped listening after a minute and enjoyed the scenery. Averaging just four or five miles an hour, it took ten minutes for them to reach what looked like a ravine between two small mountains – really not much more than large hills – that looked like a dead end. George put the Hummer in an even lower gear and moved up the ravine. A hundred yards in he turned sharply left at a spot Allison would have sworn had no opening. Twenty feet further and a quick jag to the right and suddenly she gasped. There was a flat area seemingly cut into the hillside, rock on one side and a panoramic view of the forest going off to the horizon on the others. The ground was covered with brush, rock, and moss, and several trees formed a natural canopy. Beneath the arch was a small but multi-roomed cabin that could have been taken from the cover of Architectural Digest. The cabin was simple, but elegant in a way that would have fetched a million dollars on a quarter acre in a neighborhood that had an actual road or utilities hooked up. It looked as though someone had transported it by helicopter from one of LA’s nicer areas and dropped it here. George parked in the “driveway,” a packed area under several trees. Allison noticed the cabin probably did not get much light, but when she got out of the car and looked up, she understood at once why that was. George had carefully built the cabin beneath the clutch of trees so as not to be visible from the air. Same reasoning for the makeshift carport.
“George, this is really something.”
“Wait ‘til you see the inside.” They unloaded the car and put everything on the well-crafted front porch. Somehow, nothing George did surprised her.