Confederate Gold and Silver Read Free Page A

“I might need these someday,” Paul thought as he signed off on paperwork at the Quartermaster’s Office. Without anyone noticing, he slipped both items into his jacket pocket.
    Paul had one of his detectives drive him home after his last day of work and it was a difficult ride for him to experience. As he stood in his driveway watching his detective drive away, tears washed down his face. It was difficult for him to realize his dream was finally over.
    ******
    While the ride home on the last day of work was difficult, the really difficult part was just beginning. Paul and Donna had wrestled for months over whether she should also retire when he did. While it took a couple of more weeks for her to make the decision to do so, somewhat reluctantly she retired as well. Paul had spent the past several years laying the seeds, dropping regular hints to his family that he wanted to retire to the Pawleys Island area of South Carolina. Now it was time to make the move.
    For the past twenty-two years Paul and his family had vacationed in the greater Myrtle Beach area with other family members and friends. It was during those trips that Paul’s idea of retiring to a warmer winter climate had grown. The beautiful Grand Strand, with its great beaches, warm weather, plentiful restaurants, and numerous golf courses, helped to convince Donna that this was the time to make the move. They looked forward to starting a new chapter in their lives together and being able to do so when they were still relatively young and healthy enough to enjoy it.
    Donna Waring had been a somewhat reluctant supporter of the move to South Carolina as she also had a career she loved. She had looked forward to spending many more years at her career and to developing her skills even further in the financial field. Her financial skills had allowed her to work her way up from a part-time teller’s position with the Newtown Bank and Trust to a branch manager’s position at one of the bank’s busiest branches. As much as she loved her position with the bank, the bank administrators loved her even more. In her they had found someone they could trust to train new managers and someone who could be counted on to resolve the most complex financial problems some of their customers had encountered during the market’s downturn. When they learned she was retiring, they knew she would be difficult to replace.
    Donna’s somewhat reluctance to move south also was due in part to the fact she liked the stability of her life in Connecticut. She had a beautiful home, her career was flourishing, she had a wide variety of friends, and most importantly their two children, Brian and Sean, lived close by. While her two boys were now up and out on their own, and while both were doing well for themselves, they were still her babies. Brian had recently purchased a home in Southbury; he had a nice career at Costco and was active in the town’s volunteer fire department. Sean was living nearby in Waterbury and was teaching physical education at a nearby local elementary school. He had recently surprised Donna when he told her of his engagement to a fellow teacher. It was going to be tough for her to leave them. She knew her boys did not need them to manage their daily lives any longer, but deep down Donna always wanted them to need her. She was a mother who truly loved being a mother to her two boys.
    A few days after Donna retired they made the decision to put their Connecticut colonial style home in Southbury up for sale, believing it would not sell for several months in a depressed housing market. Mistakenly they thought they would have plenty of time to find a home in South Carolina. However, soon after putting their house up for sale they found a buyer and within two days of receiving the initial offer a deal was finalized. It happened all too fast for Donna’s liking. Now they had the pressure of not only having to move out of their home and moving away from their two boys, but