Sienna Track's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Sienna Track kept the shoe on her kitchen table for three weeks. It was a woman's running shoe, still laced, found at the creek bend on the Stagmire trails. She had not called the police about it. She had run those fog-choked trails for six years, and she knew the police would file the shoe and forget it. She also knew the shoe's owner was the third jogger gone missing since spring. This morning she spread a paper sketch of the trail system across the table and weighed it down with a mug. She had no real map. No one did. The park service printed a brochure that stopped at the parking lot. So Sienna drew her own, line by line, from memory. She marked the creek bend with a black X. Then she sat back and stared at the single mark and understood the problem. One X was not a pattern. One X was a place she was afraid of. If she went hunting on the wrong stretch tomorrow, the predator would take someone else two miles away while she stood in the fog alone. She needed the other sites. She knew two joggers had been followed near the north fork in April. A third had been chased off the ridge path in May. She had heard the stories at the trailhead, traded over water bottles, never written down. Sienna spent the afternoon making calls. She reached a woman who had been followed for half a mile before the footsteps stopped. She reached a man who had felt watched from the ferns near a stone lookout tower south of the ridge. She wrote each location on the sketch and circled it. The sketch alone was not enough. Fog on those trails warped distance. A runner saying "about a quarter mile past the bridge" could mean anything. She went to the shed and took down the compass her father had left her, a heavy precision instrument with a lit dial that held true even in white-out. She would walk each reported site at dawn, take a true bearing, and pin the location on her sketch by angle and step count, not by guess. By nightfall she had five marked points. She drew lines between them. The marks did not scatter. They bent in a slow arc around the old stone lookout tower on the south ridge, the one the man had mentioned, the one ringed by trampled ferns. Every stalking had happened within sight of the tower's upper deck. The predator was not roaming. The predator was sitting up there and choosing. Sienna folded the sketch and put it in her jacket pocket with the compass. She left the laced shoe on the table. Tomorrow before sunrise she would climb the south ridge and look up at the lookout from below, and she would see whatever was looking back.