The End of Cody Miller

Author's Note:  This is my prediction of the end of Buried Treasure.  I wanted to give a "Tell Tale Heart" feel, mostly because Cody may seem evil, but at the core he isn't truly that bad.  He must have felt the guilt and it caught up to him, in the worst way possible.

Cody Miller was quickly overcome with tiredness and so he hid the hook in a loose floor board beneath his bed.  He quickly dressed for bed and landed on his mattress with a gentle thud; Cody looked quite peaceful as he slept, but his mind was surly not at piece.  Those last words of Clarence Buchanan rang throughout his head, along with those dark, dark eyes.  "You best bury me with my treasure.  Understand?"  Cody writhed in his sleep as he pictured that old man slumped over dead and his mind drifted to the hook under his floor boards.  Suddenly he heard a scraping, almost like a metal hook on a wooden door.  Just like that Cody shot out of bed, snatched his rifle and walked slowly to his door. He whipped open the door, but nothing was there.  It was all in his mind.  Throughout the night he would here this sound many more times, with his rifle in his hand, he would shakily walk to the door and look out side.  All he saw were the neighboring houses, filled with the soft darkness of sleep.  Cody barely got a wink of sleep that night.  The second the sun started to ascend across the sky Cody was up and dressed.  Ready to get the heck out of here, he went over to the loose floor board under his bed and carefully pulled it upwards.  Afraid of what he might see he squinted, but all he saw was the hook that he placed there last night.  Sighing with relief, Cody picked it up, feeling it's weight in his hands, but it felt different today.  There was something about that hook that made Cody cringe.    He hesitantly looked it over, in all of it's gold and splendor, it looked exactly as it had last night.  It still didn't feel quite right.  He peered into the opening of the hook and fell over, letting the hook clang to the floor.  He was stricken with a deathly heart attack.  Inside that hook was the dried blood of the wound that had never healed from the day many years ago when that tree had crushed his hand.  The hook rolled under his bed and right into the open floor board. It was never found again.