They were close enough now that the shadow of the great obelisk obscured the stone beneath their feet. Hailey could see the entrance to the monument up ahead, which was connected to the stone lodge next door; there was a large tour group, a mix of families, elderly couples, and school-aged kids in frenetic clumps, on its way in from the lodge through the unadorned doorway to the obelisk, which was little more than a rectangle cut right into the granite. At their distance, in contrast to the open-air park, the interior of the obelisk looked dark and ominous, less like a monument—more like a tomb.

“So why do you think they built this, then?” Nick asked, as they approached a handicap ramp that allowed them to access the entrance without going through the lodge, putting them directly at the back of the tour group filing into the open doorway. “Why here?”

Hailey took a deep final breath of the fresh air, as she followed the last tourist toward the doorway. Then she adjusted the backpack on her shoulder, feeling the weight of the eagle and the book against her side.

“Because something else was here first.”

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

It took a moment for Hailey’s eyes to adjust as she stepped deeper into the base of the granite monument. It was more than just the shift from the bright sunlight of the park to the dim interior of the hollowed out stone obelisk; the contrast was somehow temporal, like she’d just stepped through a portal back to an era when Paul Revere, Daniel Webster, and Lafayette were more than just names in a book. When the Revolutionary War was still fresh enough in people’s memories that it was still real to them, three dimensional, not flat like written history.

The air felt cold and dank against her cheeks as she glanced to her left, where the circular staircase that ascended to the top of the tower, 221 feet above, began, but there was something also electrifying about the thought that perhaps people who had fought in that war had breathed this same air; though she knew from her research that it was unlikely. Though Lafayette had laid the cornerstone in 1825, it had taken another fifteen years for the obelisk to be finished—mainly because the foundation in charge of building the monument had quickly run out of money. They had been forced to sell off plots of land surrounding the obelisk, which was the reason the monument now sat on less than four acres of grass, rather than the eighteen acres originally reserved for the site.

It was clear to Hailey that the brain trust behind the monument had been determined to follow through with their grand ambitions, which again raised the question: Why were they so keen on memorializing a fairly insignificant battle that the Revolutionaries lost?