Chapter 7: Council Oak

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     "Hank!" hisses Molly from her perch up on a large branch of an old oak tree before breaking out laughing at his startled look.

"Geez Molly, if you were a snake you would have bit me," he smiles, reaching up to clench her trim hips as she slips down into his arms, his sudden hardness gliding up her belly as her feet reach for the ground. "I found more bones in that hillside we're digging into."

"It's not a Revolutionary War graveyard," she blurts, leaning into him and straining to rub her chest against the ridges of his abdomen. "The school librarian told me that the fighting happened by the Queen's Bridge. The thirty dead soldiers were buried at the main camp at Morristown."

"Who then?" he groans, lifting her to place the middle seam of her jodhpurs against him and hardly noticing his infected hand as she clasps her riding boots around his hips.

"She sent me to the Memorial Library," she exclaims, catching sight of the red leaves glinting in the sun as she leans back to push into him just right. "You won't believe what I found out about my old house."

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    Molly's family had a hand in opening both the town's libraries. The private high school where she went had been christened the Washington School at the urging of the primary benefactor and fellow Virginian to the father of the country, her own father George Preston LaFollette. The town's library was raised on land donated by the family, and both buildings, school and library, were built by renowned New York architect and LaFollette hiree Alexander Morecraft. A new donation accompanied each new development, and the largest land sale, the orchard where Henry's family lived and worked, was going to fund LaFollette's contentious senate race.

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     "Tell me!" Henry blurts as nuts crunch under his rocking boots, acorns from the very tree under which the land was purchased from a Lenape delegation in 1681.

"The old..." Molly gasps with each forward rock, "mansion...was built...on an...Indian...MOUND."

"Wow," he shouts, matching her final exclamation as her boots slide down to the ground. "That dig might end up being a real Indian giver."

"Don't be glib," she chides, pushing away as he tries to hold onto her hips. "The hill is a sacred site for those who came before us."

"Hallelujah to that," he concedes, right arm dropping to his side as he holds up the left to show her a drying stub. "And to your voodoo cure."