The Devil's Tree Read online

  The Devil’s Tree

  Susan McCauley

  Celtic Sea Publishing

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For information regarding permission, write to Celtic Sea Publishing, a Division of Celtic Sea, LLC, Attention: Permissions, 13165 W Lake Houston Pkwy, Houston, TX 77044.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text Copyright © 2019 by Ex Libris, LLC.

  Book cover designed by JD&J. Copyright © 2019.

  All rights reserved.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged this work as follows:

  McCauley, Susan

  The Devil’s Tree/ Susan McCauley

  ISBN: 978-1-951069-00-1 (trade)

  ISBN: 978-1-951069-01-8 (ebook)

  For Alex who loves adventures and has grown to love fiction;

  for Rick who supports me no matter what;

  for Mom who has always believed in me;

  for Dad who wasn’t able to be here to see my debut novel in print;

  I love you all.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Sneak Peek at Ghost Hunters: Bones in the Wall

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Susan McCauley

  Chapter 1

  I strapped on my seat belt and got ready for a wild ride. That’s what Hunter gave me most weekends. Except tonight. Tonight he’d gone and ticked me off. I only got one Saturday night off a month, and instead of going out on a date, he was dragging me and our two best friends to the outskirts of town to snap photos of a haunted tree.

  Yeah, a freakin’ tree.

  Hunter jammed his boot into the gas pedal and the engine of his F-150 roared to life. Thankfully, the truck was in park or we’d have shot straight through his daddy’s newly painted white-picket fence. That would be bad. Real bad. His daddy would’ve come out screaming and waving his shotgun. The man was already three sheets gone. Whiskey. Wild Turkey, I think. At least that’s what Hunter’s mama always bought when I worked the night shift at the Food Mart. Same as what my mama drank.

  Hunter clapped his calloused hand on my knee, high enough that his fingers could tickle my thigh beneath my denim skirt. Man, he really knew how to get me going. I tried not to smile. Naughty boy.

  “Why can’t we just go to Mojo’s and grab a burger instead of going to some haunted tree?” I whined, pretending I didn’t care about how hot and tingly his hand felt on my thigh. I pulled my leg away and shoved a few stray hairs back into my ponytail instead of giving in to his efforts to ruin my sour mood. I deserved a little sour, didn’t I? He was dragging me on a freakin’ ghost hunt. But Hunter just grinned. He knew me too well. I’d do just about anything for that boy.

  “I promised Dylan I’d take him, that’s why.” Hunter gave me a melt-my-heart smile that promised he’d make it up to me later.

  I rolled my eyes. What on God’s good earth did Hunter even have in common with Dylan? Hunter was tall, buff, good-looking, liked sports. Dylan? Skinny, pale, glasses, computer nerd all the way. Total geek. Even if he was kind of nice.

  The boys had been in diapers together. Yeah, that long. Still, I understood their friendship just about as much as I understood why Keisha and Dylan were together. And Lord only knew what Dylan’s daddy thought of his son dating a black girl. It was kinda like what Hunter’s mama thought when she first found out he was dating me. “White trash,” she’d called me. Yeah, Keisha had to deal with racist crap and that sucked, but she acted like my life with a drunk mama in a trailer park on welfare was some kind of cakewalk by comparison. Like she would know. At least she had two parents with steady paychecks. Two parents who loved her.

  Keisha and I had been best friends until Dylan came along. I swear that girl’s as jealous as a tamale without hot sauce. I couldn’t understand it. I wasn’t the sort of girl to steal my friend’s boyfriend—even if I was interested in him, which I wasn’t. She knew that. Besides, I was with Hunter. Always would be. Next summer we’d leave this town together and never look back. We’d get scholarships for college, or we’d save up enough to get out. Either way, we were going to leave this dead-end town and my dead-end life. No more white trash comments from his mama or anyone else. I snorted, flipped open the sun visor mirror, grabbed lipstick out of my purse, and precisely applied.

  Ck-ck-ck-ck-ck! Five loud taps made me drop my lipstick and about made me crap my pants.

  Hunter laughed and hit the button to roll down my window.

  “Dammit, Keisha. Why’d you do that?” I scraped a waxy red lump off my skirt. “That was my Siren in Scarlet. You owe me a tube.”

  Keisha batted her totally fake lashes at me. “Next time I’m at Walmart.”

  “Whatever.” Still, that lipstick cost me an hour’s pay. She’d better get me a new one. Or get her rich boyfriend to. Dylan’s daddy was the richest man in town, even if he was a racist bastard. I still couldn’t believe Keisha was willing to put up with that to date Dylan.

  Keisha opened my door, shoved my seat forward with me in it, and climbed in back. I swear. . . .

  “Sorry, Kaitlyn,” Dylan mumbled, eyes darting to my boobs that were crunched to my knees.

  “Don’t be so damned polite.” I shoved my seat back with a snap, making Dylan fall into his seat. “If I hadn’t been dating this jerk for the last two years,” I said and hooked a thumb toward Hunter, “I’d never have agreed to go on this stupid ghost hunt.”

  Hunter snorted. “Kaitlyn’s in a bit of a mood.” I shot him a glare. “You’re beautiful even when you’re pissed at me.” He chuckled and put the truck in reverse, then tore out of his daddy’s gravel drive.

  “It’s not a ghost hunt,” Dylan called out from the backseat, then flipped open a page in his notebook and scribbled something I couldn’t see. “It’s the Devil’s Tree.”

  “Ghost hunt. Devil’s Tree. Whatever.” I dropped the damaged lipstick tube into my bag and snapped it closed. Dylan always sounded way smarter than everyone else. Being in Mensa, that smart person club, he probably was way smarter, but still.

  “It’s no joke, Kaitlyn.” Keisha leaned over Dylan to look at me in the visor mirror, her doe-like eyes serious. “We’ve all heard stories. People’ve been run off the road near that tree. Some of the old folks in town say if you stand out there long enough, you’ll hear moaning at night. They think it’s the spirits of all those black folks the whites in town lynched way back when. Some say it wasn’t an accident Old Joe died on that road right after trying to cut down the tree.”

  “It won’t work trying to scare me.” I had no room in my life for superstition or ghost stories. My daddy’d always told me that stories like that were nonsense. Silly tales made up to scare kids away from other people’s property. I shrugged. “I’m only going ’cause I’ve got nothing better to do on a Saturday night.” Liar. I’d much rather be having a burger and flirting a drink out of the bartender at Mojo’s. Even though Keisha and I were seventeen, the bartenders at Mojo’s tended to ignore that little detail for pretty faces. Not that I’d drink it, mind you. With Mama like she was, drinking wasn’t high on my to-do list. The point was getting it.

  Hunter turned out of his neighborhood and headed toward the old farm road that would take us to the Devil’s Tree.

  Rocks crunched and churned under our tires, and I turned around to get a better look at Dylan’s fancy camera. “So, if it’s not haunted, then why the camera?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t haunted,” Dylan said. Something in his serious eyes made me shudder.

  I turned back around in my seat and gazed out my window at the darkening sky. At the bright greens of summer fading in the twilight. The hum of cicadas buzzed and shivered through the glass. A perfect summer sound. The sound of a warm, humid, sleepy summer night.

  “I think it is haunted,” Dylan said, his voice quiet but certain. “But I’m not after ghosts. I want to learn more about the tree. I’m hoping that the pictures we get and whatever we experience will give us a better idea of what happened there. The town newspaper has already agreed to publish an article if we find anything new. Except for Old Joe’s accident, they’ve got nothing but rumors and vague reports. And most are decades old.”

  “Yeah,” Keisha said. “We have important questions to answer. Like why do leaves never grow on it? And why does snow never fall there?” Well look at her, getting all in on her boyfriend’s obsession.

  “Of course snow doesn’t fall on it, Keisha. We live in southeast Texas. Snow barely falls anywhere down here.” She scowled and I looked out my window, not so thrilled about being bitchy with her—but seriously? Suddenly the world revolves around what your boyfriend’s interested in? Besides, the good folks of Harland had been asking those questions for years. “I don’t see how you’re gonna figure it all out, when Old Joe and every other geezer who’s
ever gone to that tree has come up empty-handed.”

  “Or dead.” Hunter smiled, gunned the accelerator, and hit a pothole.

  Keisha squealed and we all popped half out of our seats. Why did I put up with him? Maybe because he was a good kisser. Maybe because of his hot muscles. Maybe because he was the only person in my life who thought I was more than just a cute body with a drunk mother. I don’t know. I huffed and let my arms fall crisscross over my chest, still pissed that we weren’t going to hang out at Mojo’s.

  I peeked at Dylan and Keisha in the rearview mirror. “None of those people were Dylan,” Keisha said and draped an arm around Dylan’s shoulder. “He has the equipment. We’re bound to find something new, right, baby?” she cooed, which made Dylan blush and me want to vomit.

  I shrugged and glared at Hunter, who only laughed. “Lighten up, babe.” His hand found its way back to my knee. “It’ll be fun.” His finger danced in a little circle on my thigh. “Maybe when we’re done we’ll still have time to grab a burger, or something else.” His voice dipped in that low, sexy way it does when he wants more than a burger.

  I shoved his hand away, trying to keep a smile from busting out on my lips. “Keep your hands on the wheel.”

  The Devil’s Tree wasn’t too far from town. Just a few miles down the old dirt road, then about fifty feet off the shoulder in an area that was called a state park, but looked like nothing more than an abandoned field with scattered oaks.

  Then I saw it. Coming closer through the dark. The beams of our headlights illuminated its skeletal limbs that stuck out at odd angles, a length of chain-link fence wrapped around its trunk maybe in an attempt to stop crazy folks from coming out here to try and hack it down.

  Hunter pulled to a stop and let the engine idle. We stared. There were a couple other oak trees nearby, but they had leaves. Not the Devil’s Tree. Nope. Just dead limbs and gnarly roots. It looked like something straight out of one of the scary movies we watched at Hunter’s house some weekends.

  “Well, we’re here.” Hunter turned the key and the engine died. He opened his door. I heard Hunter’s breathing and the squeak of Keisha squirming on the vinyl backseat, but the hum of cicadas was suspiciously missing.

  I closed my eyes and listened. There were no sounds nearby. No people. No cars. If I listened closely, I could hear a few birds in the distance. The bellow of a frog.

  My eyes snapped open and I looked at the deeply shadowed oak. A chain dangled from one of its middle branches. Red spray-painted graffiti decorated its trunk with the words Stay Back! I could even see a few hack marks toward the base, barely showing from beneath the chain link. Those must’ve been the marks Old Joe had carved into the trunk when he’d tried to rid us all of the fiendish tree. The thought of Old Joe’s broken body made me shiver.

  The day after he tried to hack down the Devil’s Tree, they’d found his car crashed in the ravine, his body bloated from a night in the river. But they never found out what caused the crash.

  “Come on then.” Dylan pushed my seat, nudging me to let him out. “Let’s go have a look.” He stuffed the notebook in his backpack and grabbed the camera.

  I swung my feet out of the cab and felt my three-inch heels sink into the muck. This was so not my thing. I might work at the Food Mart, but I liked going out to restaurants and the mall and having fun. Not going camping or walking through muddy fields in the summer heat. Hunter owed me. Big time. So did Dylan. “Right,” I said, and took a step forward, trying to balance on the balls of my feet so my heels wouldn’t squish into the mud.

  Dylan climbed out behind me, then Keisha. “Here.” Dylan handed Keisha a thermometer. “You can monitor the area for temperature fluctuations.”

  “Ooo, sounds important.” Keisha smiled and took the gauge like she’d just been handed a diamond ring.

  Oh, please. I rolled my eyes and shivered despite the muggy summer breeze.

  Hunter slammed his door, walked around the front of the truck, and slung an arm around my waist. He pulled me toward him, his warm, musky scent drawing me closer.

  I couldn’t help but smile. He was hotter than a goat’s butt in a pepper patch.

  Dylan turned on his fancy digital camera and began snapping shots, the flash popping like blinding bursts of lightning.

  Hunter shielded his face with his free arm. “Aw, man . . . do you really need the flash? We can’t see anything.”

  Dylan lowered his camera. “It’s dark out, Hunt.” To him, Hunter was Hunt. Always. I hated it. “I won’t get much without a flash. But I may try the infrared setting once we get closer to the tree. Come on.”

  Despite my flash-assaulted eyes, I could see Dylan’s perfect white teeth grinning like a demented jack-o’-lantern in the moonlight. Boy, he really did get off on this stuff.

  Hunter tugged me forward, his warm body shielding me from the strange, cool breeze that had kicked up.

  I stumbled in a hole, but Hunter caught me.

  “Damn. I broke a heel.” I bent down and felt the heel of my right shoe dangling. These things cost me nearly an entire shift’s pay and we had too many bills for me to go and buy new ones.

  “Whoever heard of wearing high heels on an expedition?” Keisha said.

  “People who didn’t know they were going on an expedition when they were asked out on their only free Saturday night this month,” I snapped. Ugh, sometimes she made my skin crawl. She’d say anything to please Dylan. Fact is, before they got together this past fall, Keisha never wore anything but heels. I hate it when girls change who they are just for a boy. At least Hunter knew who I was and where I came from. And he loved me despite it.

  Screw it. I ripped the heel off my damaged shoe and handed Hunter my other one. “Would ya mind?”

  He looked at me, his hazel eyes gray in the moonlight. “Seriously?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not like I can wear one without the other. Go ahead. Break it.”

  “Alright, but I’ll buy you a new pair.” And with one hefty snap, that’s just what he did, then tossed the broken wedge off into the dark field. I slipped my second heel-less shoe onto my foot and started walking. Huh, they were actually more comfortable this way, but I’d never admit it.

  “Slow down, babe.” Hunter caught up with me, draping his denim jacket over my shoulders. Dylan and Keisha trailed behind.

  “How long is this gonna take?” I was about ten feet from the tree when something stopped me. I’m not sure what, but this feeling came over me. A sort of uneasy feeling like dread leaking into my gut. “I—I don’t want to go any closer.” My words came out in a whisper soft as the breeze.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?” Dylan asked and pushed a button on his camera. I scowled, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I’m switching over to infrared so I don’t blind you guys.”

  Hunter took off around the backside of the tree.

  “Where you going?” I asked, not wanting him to leave me, but sure as hell not willing to follow.

  “Gotta take a piss.”

  I took a step forward. Stopped. There was that feeling again. Like something died inside me. “Don’t you dare do it near the tree,” I screeched, surprised at the fear in my voice.

  Hunter laughed. “I’ll piss right on the damn thing. See if it stirs up any spirits for Dylan.”

  Keisha scowled, and Dylan just kept shooting pictures.

  If ghosts did exist, Hunter would likely piss them off enough that they’d come scare the living hell out of us. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts. That’s what I kept telling myself.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Dylan kept shooting photos.

  Everything went silent, except for the pitter-pat of Hunter’s pee splattering against tree bark and the click, click, clicking of Dylan’s camera.

  A gust kicked up and the dead branches rustled overhead. Keisha scooted closer to me and shivered. She kept her eyes locked on the temperature gauge. White puffs billowed out of her mouth with each breath. It reminded me of when we were seven years old in the neighbor’s haunted house. We’d screamed and cried and held on to each other for dear life. I loved Keisha, even if she was a pain in my backside sometimes.