An Excerpt from The Treehouse

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.”