Missing

"There's been another disappearance."

Smallish town - not too big, not so small everyone knows everyone. GI-sized would do. Over the course of a hot, sweaty summer, random people start disappearing. First it was the homeless man who lived under a bridge just outside of town. He was only missed because he would his daily rounds around the south end of town looking for cans to recycle and had made a few acquaintances on his rounds - people he would nod and smile at as he walked by, shopkeepers and the like. They noticed he stopped coming by but didn't think much of it figuring he'd probably just moved on.

Next person to disappear was a junior high student. A girl who walked home every day. She didn't have far to walk really, a few blocks, but on the last day of school she left the school and never arrived at home. There was a panic, a lot of new coverage and pleas for help or info but as the days turned into weeks and others began disappearing, her family began to lose hope and media attention always seemed to turn to the latest disappearance.

Two weeks after the student, a young man, 22-ish, goes missing on his way to his job at a construction site. He's relatively new in town. He came with his girlfriend who wanted to move closer to her family. He was going to propose the night of his disappearance.

The police have no leads. Absolutely no evidence at all to give them any kind of clue as to what happened. But while they treat both missing person cases very seriously, they haven't yet decided to tie the cases together. Instead they treat them as separate but coincidental cases.

Until the next person goes missing. This time it's an older man, mid-late 40s. A prominent real estate agent. He was on his way to show a house. The buyers waited as long as they could before they began calling the office to ask after him. Some confusion ensues as they try to retrace his steps. His wife is called and when it's established he's gone missing, she freaks out because she's been following the news on the other missing cases. She raises a huge stink with the cops and it catalyzes them into... I don't know but somehow the missing agent makes them realize they've got a serial kidnapper/s on their hands. But there has been no ransom demands. Nothing. everyone's distraught and frustrated.

Throughout the summer, periodically another person goes missing. And there's no apparent common thing to connect all of the cases. It's so random. By August and with 3 or 4 more missing cases to add to the count, the Police chief resigns under public pressure who deem him ineffectual.

But where I'm going with this... or where I WANT to go is eventually we come to the missing people who've all been snatched, drugged, and left in an abandoned but locked down asylum. Before you say a word, I've never seen any of the Saw movies. There's no psycho chasing these folks. Just a crazy asylum escapee who misses the former residents. Or something. I may have to give up on the asylum thing. I don't think I can work it into the missing persons thing. I just love the site opacity.us so much and I'm fascinated by his images of abandoned places. I want to work up a story for them.

But then GI currently has a young man who's gone missing and the story is just weird to me which got me thinking about a town like GI where random people just go missing. I thought about it to creep myself out a little but I haven't gotten to the point of where they disappeared to and how it all gets solved.

Anyway, this feels nice. Some ideas are kicking around the noggin and that is of the good.