Eddy and Tom prowled the darkened streets hunting for adventure. When asked by their friends and family what they did at night the two would simply shrug and say they didn’t know. Both were in their senior year of high school, they were caught up in the eternal dilemma between childhood and adulthood. Neither was wealthy enough to escape the small town they called home and go to college. Both wanted to travel overseas and take a trip to Europe, or anywhere for that fact. Neither had been more than a hundred miles from their house.

During the day the town was boring, your typical small town in the USA. At night the dark transformed the picket fences and long winding roads into something different, something more exciting. The pair of intrepid explorers would stalk the woods and the empty fields late at night; sometimes they would hide in dark alleys and discuss their plans for the future. Tom was the bolder of the two, although Eddy was no coward. Tom’s plans usually involved bending if not breaking the law outright. Robbing the local bank on a Friday afternoon and escaping by train to the coast was a plan he had proposed to Eddy on many occasions.

Eddy wasn’t afraid of breaking the law, or even of being shot while trying to escape. His fear was of being caught, of living the rest of his life in a cold, dark cell. His youth wasted on breaking rocks for the man. This was the fear that kept him in line; his father had done a stint of time for his third DUI. He had told Eddy all the little tortures that get applied to a prisoner, the loss of freedom, the loss of privacy, having not one tiny bit of control over your own life. Eddy took these lessons to heart; he would rather die than go to jail.

It was only a matter of time before Tom got around to suggesting to Eddy that they rob Mrs. Henderson’s house. She was an old lady who lived way out in the country; supposedly she had found a payroll shipment that the Confederate Army had lost during the Civil War in her backyard long ago. One thing was for sure, she had a huge collection of antiques from the war, and those had to be worth something, to somebody. It took Tom three nights of pestering Eddy to get him to agree to the deed.