Born on the 4th of July

still, her mind racing.
Merissa Hatfield and her accomplice had obviously worked this all out.
A cemetery!
And in the days of Covid19, while a cemetery didn’t tend to be crowded, it was also a time when people were staying home, when they were busy trying to survive, they didn’t worry as much about bringing flowers to a cemetery or remembering their departed loved ones. Even funerals were sparsely attended.
Of course, those managing the cemetery would know when a burial was going to take place.
They’d also watched, she was certain. They had known Annie Green would come to honor her father; they’d even known her husband left her there for her private time before joining her.
As to her, well . . .
She’d walked right into their office. And while she hadn’t presented them with her credentials, she had presented them with a challenge.
Taking her had made sense in two ways.
She was expecting a child.
And since she claimed she had a witness, she was a danger to them.
But they had to know by now that law enforcement was crawling all over the cemetery.
That would mean they’d need to move quickly.
Footsteps, hurried, came closer, closer, closer . . . and stopped.
She knew it was Merissa Hatfield.
She dared to open her eyes; they were shielded by the remnants of the shroud.
Merissa Hatfield had her phone out; she was staring at it and then pounding at it. She let out a sound of furious aggravation.
Apparently, some cell phones didn’t work in these tunnels.
“Where are you, you ass,” Merissa murmured. “We’ve got to get out of here, we’ve got to get them to the farmhouse and abandon ship! Where are you, where are you, where are you? I can’t drag two pregnant cows through the tunnels alone!”
Cow?
Two pregnant cows?
That’s what the women they probably killed after birth were to them; farm animals, breeders, nothing more, while the infants were precious cargo, sold to the highest bidders.
She tried to judge Merissa Hatfield’s position and the woman herself. She had only come after Angela when the man had already accosted her. Angela had been held—and that was the only way she had gotten the knock-out rag over her nose and face.
She wasn’t tough, and she wasn’t trained.
Well, she wasn’t pregnant, either.
But she was only tough when she was in control, when her victims were in a state in which they couldn’t fight back.
That was the deciding factor.
Once again, she begged silent forgiveness from Papa Jim.
She curled her fingers tightly around the femur.
She heard Jennie’s ghost whisper out in worry.
“She doesn’t see you; she doesn’t see you! Lay low. We can get more help!”
“Stupid cell phone!”
Merissa Hatfield threw her cell phone down and then seemed to think better of it. “All right, I don’t know where the hell you are, but I can get one of those bitches to the farmhouse and cut the damn brat out of her and run. Screw you, Charles! I’m on my way out of here!”
She was going to leave; she’d find Annie Green.
Cut the damned brat out of her and run!
Angela no longer had a choice.
She threw her legs over the side; she meant to spring up.
She was almost at her full nine months of pregnancy—springing was not really an apt description for anything she could do.
But she was up.
Merissa Hatfield swirled around. For a split second, she stared at Angela, her mouth gaping in horror.
Angela could only imagination what she looked like, draped in the torn and decaying remnants of Papa Jim’s shroud.
But then Merissa let out a scream of rage and hurtled herself toward Angela.
Angela lifted Papa Jim’s femur, and swung with all her might.
*
There had to be a spring, a mechanism.
And Jackson reminded himself, whatever it was, it was something that had been created circa the Civil War.
He tried again to move the altar; it wouldn’t budge.
Then he thought the mechanism didn’t have to be by the altar or under the altar. If it was a lever, it could work from connections that had been set just about anywhere.
He stopped, frustrated, and looked around again.
Each of the square niches in the wall for coffins were sealed in and had an iron basket at one end for flowers.
He started at the front on the left side and twisted, turned, and inspected them, one by one.
His frustration grew again.
Then . . .
Midway through the right side, he twisted one of the little iron buckets.
And it kept going.
The altar shifted backward and a hole was revealed.
He rushed to it and Cameron followed. They saw steps led downward into darkness.
“Corby, yes!”
His son had been right. Tunnels stretched below. And whoever had taken Annie Green had come through this mausoleum and taken her down . . .
Angela had disappeared from the office.
So, there were other entrances. The tunnel system had to be vast and huge and lead to . . .
He started down the ladder and then hesitated, thinking that the earth-packed tunnels might not offer cell service.
He tried Corby’s phone and then Adam’s. No answer.
He tried Jon Dickson. No answer.
He called headquarters.
And that was needed. Within minutes, the cemetery and surrounding areas would be flooded with police.
He headed quickly down the steps . . .
And into what appeared to be a dark abyss.
*
The tunnels were gruesome.
Corby couldn’t think of any other way to describe them.
He had done his reading so he knew they had been dug out slowly and painstakingly by a group of people who had done the work at night, by darkness, determined on their belief that slavery was wrong. There had been a few underground vaults from the early days, and the tunnel workers had built on that.
But when the war had ended and the world was in conflux and people were free, they still weren’t seen as equal. And so those who were friends, close or even relatives, wound up being buried deep in the ground in the “white” cemetery.
Others were buried here as well. People of all colors. Corby had found sketches of the services that had been performed in the