Chest?

Deep in the penitentiary building where death row inmates were kept, it was said that there existed a chest containing the deepest secrets that each of those who had to leave the death row by the conventional way. It was always the same set up; the day before a death row inmate is due to exit the facility through the prevailing method of execution, he (there were hardly any female death row inmates ever) was given a single sheet of letter-sized paper and a pencil placed on a table in a room with his attorney and himself present, with no one else. A customary window with reinforced glass was necessary for the guard to ensure that the condemned wasn't going to rob the State of justice through suicide.

It was said that during those moments, the deepest secrets that these condemned men had were written down on it and slipped into a manila envelope that their lawyer would bring along. Once that was done, the sealed manila envelope was taken to the chest by the warden, where it would be placed in it that chest with all the other such manila envelopes. The wardens have claimed that they had never tried to read what was in the envelopes, but they did not deny that there was a chest of such terrifying treasure.

I heard about this from an old-timer. He was supposed to be lethally injected some ten years ago having spent nearly fifteen years on death row, but at the last moment his sentence was commuted to life due to age considerations. He described the ritualistic paper-pencil-envelope to me the way I had described earlier, and was the first to hint that there was such a chest hidden on site.

I was no inmate. Just a junior lawyer working with the local pro bono group trying to provide good but free representation for some of the more needy inmates. But that story the old-timer told me piqued my curiousity. A single chest full of the writings of men who knew that their time to repay the blood debt had come. I doubt it would contain any major secrets of any sort, but the mere idea that these men could even commit to paper their thoughts just before a judicial death was mesmerising.

Of course I asked the warden. And you knew what he had said. I was happy to dismiss the old-timer's words when on that one peculiar day I found a trap door in the warden's office that I had never noticed before. It was an old-time trap door complete with an iron ring to help lift it up with a crowbar. It was flushed into the surface, and I realised that I didn't notice its existence because there was always a small single-seater couch sitting right smack on top of it. Most interestingly, there was a crowbar next to it. I had little doubts what that crowbar was for.

Why else would the warden have a crowbar in his office?

(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 16-Mar-2014 22:21:38)