But they have come in droves with their orange safety jackets swarming over the hills like florescent ants. They have whistles and dogs on long leashes who have their noses to the ground snuffling the underbrush. Pushing against rocks and upending rotten logs. The Safety Jackets have long sticks and poke at the ground meticulously. They call out to each making sure that everyone is kept in eyesight. Some of them carry clipboards. Some of them have radios. Some of them carry well-oiled sidearms in heavy looking holsters upon their crowded belts and have bright shiny badges that glint in the sunlight like beacons. They swarm the hills glinting and shouting and barking and searching.
They are searching for me. At least, they are searching for what is left of me. They are looking for my bones stripped away by hungry little carnivorous insects and sharp toothed rodents. I'm under this ground somewhere and they are looking for me. They are looking for a sign of the plastic shroud I might be wrapped in. They are looking for disturbed earth. Maybe a flash of bleached bone peaking out from some fungus patch. They are hoping the cadaver dogs will catch the scent of rot. They are looking for my body in these golden summer hills. They are searching for me.
I was supposed to come home early that night I had told my mother. I was going to the local bar for a drink with a young man I had met the day before. My mother didn't know him. I told her he liked to talk about old movies. He was older than me but not too much. I was excited. I put on my favorite spring dress and brushed my hair. I coloured my lips and curled my eyelashes. I giggled when my mother asked me if he was handsome. I kissed my mother goodbye and told her not to wait up. My dark hair bobbing about my shoulders as I closed the gate and waved was the last she would ever see of me.
The police know it has to be bad. They've seen this kind of thing before. People remember me at the bar that night but do not know the man I am with. I seem too drunk at some point all of a sudden like. I stumble out followed closely by the mysterious man. There is blood on the sidewalk. It proves to be mine. I have been missing for a week when a burly detective tells my mother they found an abandoned car in the hills and my blood was soaking the seats an unhealthy rotting red. The car has stolen plates and a stripped serial number so they can't tell who owns it but a witness thinks they remember it outside the bar from the night I disappeared. They search and search and still there is no sign of me. They look for the man who took me. His description matches two other cases of missing young women but no one finds him.
I remember him. He sweet talked me at the coffee shop. I was reading a book about Boris Karloff. He told me his favorite movie was Frankenstein and did I know Boris was Christopher Lee's neighbor? His young features sharp and dark. His hair long enough to fall into his eyes. He charmed me into a drink and then another until I felt strange and heavy. He held me up and slammed my head into the car door when I didn't want to get in. I remember his eyes glowing demonic red but that might have just been my fear staining my memories. I remember him punching my face in the back seat of the car when I started to scream. I remember a flash of sharp silver coming under my chin as he forced his way inside me. I remember crying through swollen bloody eyes. I remember bleeding. I remember the pain swallowing me whole. The blade deep inside me. My insides spilling outside all over the seat vinyl. And then a creeping numbness took me over. I didn't scream anymore. I didn't struggle. The night became a haze and the last thing I remember in my life is a deep black sky with a full moon as big as a dinner plate and a million stars winking at me all at once.
Months go by. The summer gets hot and still no one finds me. The bees buzz indifferently. The alfalfa flowers bow at each Safety Jacket's passing but hold on to their secrets. They search the hills. Their hope dying in the sweltering heat. The whippoorwills' cries become a funeral song. My mother holds on to the idea that I might be alive and cries bitterly every night. The officers know they are looking for a body. They want to find me and find the man who did this. They want him before he does it again. They need my body to prove I was here. To find hair, fiber, DNA, anything to point to my attacker. They are looking for me. For any sign that I was here. A piece of torn fabric. Trampled grass. A foot print. A drag mark. Anything to tell them where he put me. I have to be here somewhere but each Safety Jacket knows sometimes lost girls are never found.
I'm in those hills still and they are looking for me. Hope caught up in their throats as the dust settles on their sweating skin. I'm watching them swarm up the mountain side. I'm watching them. There are other bodies out here. An old native burial site where a whole settlement was nearly wiped out by small pox and buried in unmarked trenches. There are settlers in family graveyards that couldn't make it through the harsh winters and froze or died of starvation as the countryside was first settled by white men. A woman who died in childbirth 112 years ago buried on the family plot, her grave marker long since knocked over, rotted away and the homestead forgotten. Her little baby buried with her. A house burnt down 50 years ago not far up the road with an old man inside whose charred bones are still mixed in with the overgrown foundation. A drunk hunter who accidentally shot himself in the fall of 1973 whose bones were ripped apart and spread across the hills by coyotes.
There are bones under this ground. Mountains built on centuries of bones but they are looking for mine. My little lost bones; the bones of one girl in a vast wilderness. They know I am in these hills still and they want to bring me home. So many miles of hill and mountain and tree and grass and creek and leaf and fallen stump and animal burrows and little caves and deep bushes and dense thorns and surprised whippoorwills. They know I'm in those hills still but there is so much to search. So many places I could be. I am watching. I am watching the wind come from the North. I am watching the leaves dance in the birch trees throwing sun dappled patterns onto the forest floor. I am watching the birds flutter from tree branch to tree branch. I am watching fat bees drunkenly dance across the fields. I am watching in those hills... still as my last breath on that dark night. I died here and those wild hills call me home.
(He adjusts the orange safety jacket over his shoulders and whips the sweat away from his stinging eyes. He pokes at the ground with his stick, his face down, one foot carefully in front of the other, his eyes diligently scanning. To his left another searcher is doing the same. A radio crackles in the distance. Suddenly his boot slips down below him into a soft part of the ground and into a hole. He almost trips. He looks back, crouches down to inspect the hole and sees plastic and a faint white glow. His breathe catches in his throat and then he starts to yell.)
