While only 2 years of age, Bethany’s mother disappears without a trace. Her father ultimately remarries and together he and his new wife have twin boys. Shortly after, Bethany goes to live with her grandmother, Rebecca. Rebecca has a mysterious past. Come the summer following her 9th grade year, the brothers, now ten, come to spend the summer in rural Howington (picture Upstate New York). The day of their arrival, odd footprints are discovered near the stream besides the woods--the center of activity for the neighborhood kids. The next day while doing yard work for Bethany’s grandmother, Dennis, a neighborhood boy and classmate of Bethany, discovers the same prints in the flowerbed outside the boys’ window. The next evening while playing a game of chase in the woods, the two brothers go missing, the only clue the King Tree.