Below is an excerpt from The Treehouse, available now for preorder and out on Amazon Kindle and paperback this Friday (April 26).
The first thing Lucas thought was that
they’d been caught. Someone’s mom called someone else’s and they’d been found
out. Or, his sister Allison ratted him out to their parents. His heart pounded
in his chest, knowing that they’d look out the window and see all of their
parents coming out to the woods – this
secret place, their hideout.
The moonlight illuminated just enough
of the area that he could see that there were no parents outside, no flashlight
beams coming their way. Lucas breathed a sigh of relief but choked up again
when he heard a sound.
A grunt, or a cough, in these woods
travelled far. The boys couldn’t see anything, but they darted their eyes
about, trying to make out the source of the sound. Again, a grunt. The shuffling
of feet in dirt and leaves.
There, just a few yards out the window,
Lucas saw it. He pointed so his friends could see what he was seeing. It was a
man trudging, laboriously, through the woods. He was carrying something large
draped across his shoulders. From the rustling sound, it seemed to be a trash
bag -- a large trashbag with something heavy inside.
Lucas’s heart beat even faster than
before, though his body felt paralyzed. He didn’t know what was going on. Could
the man see them as well, up in the tree? Could he hear them?
The man dropped whatever he was
carrying on his shoulders onto the ground in front of a fallen tree log. He had
a shovel in one hand, and he started to dig. The three boys watched for – what
felt like to them – an eternity as this man dug a hole in the soft earth.
Finally, the man shoved the trashbag
and its contents into the hole, covered it up with dirt and leaves and
attempted to roll the fallen log over his handiwork. Once he was done, he ran
off, back toward the city, out of the woods.
The three boys slumped down onto the
floor of their treehouse. Lucas felt sweat on his palms and on his forehead. He
looked at Tyler, his eyes large and full of fear. Elijah was holding his legs
up against his chest. Neither of them said a word.
Tyler slowly reached up and slid the
window back into place over the framed hole.
“Guys, what did we just see? What was
that?” Elijah’s voice cracked, breaking the silence and darkness. It was the
first sound any of them had made in almost an hour.
Tyler
looked at Lucas and Elijah, the same fear still in his eyes. He said, “That was
a body.”
