27: Chapter 27: Hidden Secrets in Shredded Paper, Bullets Lead the Way

Walsh bit down on his flashlight again. Just as he was preparing to check one more time, his gaze suddenly locked onto the bottom board of the coffin.

Not on the skeleton.

But on the coffin itself.

He squatted down and gently tapped the wood of the coffin's bottom board with his gloved right hand.

The sound was hollow.

Too hollow.

With a typical wooden coffin, the bottom board is in direct contact with the soil underneath; tapping it would produce a dull, solid sound without any echo.

But when he tapped the bottom of Kramer's coffin, beneath the sound of solid wood lay a shallow, faint vibration that only came from a hollow space.

Walsh's intuition flared instantly.

Squatting down, he carefully wedged the tip of his entrenching shovel into the gap beneath the skeleton and above the bottom board.

With a gentle pry upward, he pried open a crack in the thin layer of wood on top.

A false bottom.

He moved his flashlight over the crack, and the moment the beam of light shone inside, he saw what was hidden within:

A flat document envelope carefully wrapped in oilpaper.

The surface of the oilpaper had grown sticky and yellowed with age, with deep water stains seeping in from the dampness beneath the coffin, but the overall seal did not appear to be completely compromised.

Walsh stared at the document envelope, not reaching for it immediately.

His lips parted slightly, uttering a whisper so soft that only he could hear.

In the silent grave, the sound was like a handful of sand falling onto stone.

"None of the guesses were wrong."

"Everyone—Gore, Kramer, that missing reporter... they were all silenced."

"In 1947, what crashed in Roswell was no weather balloon."

"It was a real extraterrestrial spacecraft."

"Since that year, since 1947, someone in the Federal Government has been covering it up."

"Someone is researching it."

"Someone is exploiting it."

"Someone killed to keep this secret."

Setting the entrenching shovel aside, he reached into the compartment and gently pulled out the oilpaper-wrapped document envelope.

It was tightly sealed.

Several strands of hemp rope, now brittle and stiff, were tied around the oilpaper with old-fashioned fisherman's knots common in the 1940s.

He was in no rush to open it; unwrapping eighty-year-old paper in this environment could easily destroy the most crucial parts inside if he wasn't careful.

He carefully placed the document envelope into a pre-prepared waterproof ziplock bag and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket.

Then he stood up, closed the coffin lid, and began shoveling the dirt back into the pit, scoop by scoop.

His movements were swift but meticulous.

He compacted each shovel of dirt as much as possible to keep the surface level, scattering the excess gravel and dry grass back over the topsoil.

By the time his last shovel of dirt was in place, the ground before the grave looked almost identical to how it had before he dug it up.

Only by squatting down and looking very closely could one detect an imperceptible difference in the looseness of the soil compared to the surrounding grass.

Walsh folded the entrenching shovel back into its short-handled form, packed it into his tool bag, then squatted down and did one last thing.

He pressed his palm against the gray-white granite tombstone.

It was a simple gesture—just a hand resting against the cold stone.

Then he stood up, strode through the cemetery's oak grove, and walked along the abandoned dirt road behind the hill toward the gray pickup truck parked at the end.

It was just past four in the morning.

The moon had completely sunk below the low clouds, and the eastern sky was not yet bright.

The dead of night in Los Angeles quietly receded behind him, silent as a low tide.

He climbed into the driver's seat of the pickup, closed the door, started the engine, threw his tool bag onto the passenger seat, and pulled the sealed bag from his inner pocket.

He switched on the overhead reading light, placed the oilpaper package on his lap, and began to open it.

The strands of hemp rope on the outside of the oilpaper snapped into several pieces at the gentlest touch of his fingers.

The oilpaper itself was also very brittle, cracking at the corners with the slightest force, revealing what had been sealed inside for over half a century.

Walsh poured out the contents of the document envelope.

It was not the neatly bound file folder he had imagined.

Instead, it was a pile of fragments—torn, scattered scraps of paper with jagged edges.

Some pieces were only the size of a fingernail, some were slightly larger, and the largest was barely two fingers wide.

Walsh gently sorted through the fragments, spreading them out on his lap in a rough arrangement, and examined them piece by piece under his flashlight.

The writing on most of the paper scraps had faded to the point of being barely legible.

After all, they had been sealed underground for eighty years; even with the oilpaper wrapping, the chemical degradation of the ink was inevitable.

However, the writing on a few fragments was clearer, seemingly written with a special carbon ink. Walsh picked these pieces out.

His gaze lingered on the first piece.

"...inside the base, all personnel must..."

The rest was torn off.

The next piece.

"...non-disclosure agreement, No. H-7..."

Torn again.

The next one.

"...leaving means..."

The tear was right next to the last word, 'means'.

The strokes after it had been ripped away.

But read together, it was—leaving means? Leaving means what?

Leaving means being silenced.

This was something he could have inferred from the fates of Gore, Kramer, and the others.

He flipped over the last relatively intact fragment. It had only a single line of handwriting, the script noticeably different from the previous printed text, written in a great rush.

The ink was darker than the printed text, and the strokes were so heavy they had nearly punctured the paper.

"...they got that thing, alien technology, I don't know what it is, but..."

The rest had been torn down the middle.

The penmanship dragged a long ink trail on the final stroke of the word 'but,' as if the writer's hand had been violently yanked away right at that moment.

Walsh placed the fragments back into the bag one by one, his fingers perfectly steady.

But his mind was already pieceing these fragmented sentences together, forming an increasingly clear picture.

A base.

There was a base.

Personnel who had signed non-disclosure agreements.

Agreement No. H-7.

The employee later discovered that signing it was useless; anyone who left the base would be silenced.

So he began looking for a way to get the secret out.

He found the media—a newspaper owner who was willing to believe he had a real scoop.

Kramer took his tip and sent a reporter to investigate whether Gore had indeed said those things outside the bar.

The results of the investigation confirmed everything. Gore wasn't crazy; what he said was true. There really was a base beneath the Hoover Dam, and they really were researching something in that base—

An alien technology.

Kramer decided to push forward, even planning out the topics for the second and third articles in the exposé series.

But after the first article went to print, that employee could no longer be reached.

Kramer began receiving threats.

The threats escalated, but not in the typical 'shut your mouth' kind of way.

Instead, it was an absolute power that made him certain that if he spoke a single word more, not only he, but his family, the entire newspaper, and everyone associated with him would be wiped out.

So he went mad—though 'mad' wasn't quite accurate. He was literally scared out of his mind.

He went to the police station to file a report, not because he wanted police protection, but because he wanted a public record:

'I've spoken, I know nothing, I'll take the secret to my grave, everything I said was a lie.'

He wanted to use this public, hysterical display to send a signal to those watching him:

'I'm ruined, I'm no longer a threat, please spare me.'

But those watching him never spared anyone.

They grew tired of waiting for Kramer to jump, so they stopped waiting.

They poisoned him first, then threw him off the roof.

No, they might have skipped the step of throwing him off the roof entirely.

A corpse with absolutely no fractures on its body was placed on the sidewalk below, with a white chalk outline drawn around it.

The police arrived, signed off, wrote a report, stamped it 'suicide due to depression,' and wrapped it up perfectly.