Chapter 1: The Alarm Bell Rings

I looked at the caller ID before I answered the phone. It was odd enough to get a call on Sunday afternoon, a time my wife Claire and I set aside for family, but even more odd that it was my attorney in Vero Beach, Florida.

“Hey Pete! What’s going on?”

“Hi, Dave. Look, I’m really sorry about calling you on a Sunday, but I heard something that I wanted to check out with you.

“I was out golfing this morning with my usual crew, including George; you remember my buddy George, don’t you?”

“Sure. Nice guy, terrible golfer.”

“Yeah him. These days, he works in real estate in town, especially ag properties. He told me that your grove had been sold to some developer.

“I told him that I hadn’t heard anything like that from you, and I thought that you would have told me if you were making a major move like that.”

I listened to Pete and was so shocked by what he had just told me that it took me a few moments to recover my wits.

“No, we most certainly have not sold the grove! You know we were thinking of developing it ourselves when the time came.”

“That’s what I thought. Listen, maybe George got it wrong. I’ll do a little more checking tomorrow when everyone’s back at work.”

“I appreciate that Pete, but I think I’ll grab a flight down to check it out. I haven’t been down there for three months, which is longer than usual. No matter what, I should go there anyway, just to keep an eye on things.”

I didn’t know why, but I had a bad gut feeling about this.

We said our goodbyes, and I called out to Claire,

“Claire, do you want to come with me to Vero? Pete heard a rumor that I need to check out.”

We got the kids off to stay with the parental units (mine — Clair’s still lived in California) for an as-of-yet undetermined amount of time. They didn’t mind. They got to spend time out on the ranch with their grandparents, who spoiled them rotten!

Two hours later we had tickets to Orlando and were packing our bags.

We flew into Orlando the next morning and I picked up a rental car to drive down to Vero.

I had tried to call our grove manager, Bruce McWilliams, to send someone to pick us up, but he hadn’t answered his cell phone. That wasn’t that unusual; he was a big deep-sea fisherman (as was I) and might be out of cell range for a couple days if they had gone to one of the islands. Maybe he just forgot to recharge it.

Before I left, the night before, I did get on-line and checked out the bank accounts. The smaller account that Bruce had complete access to had been cleared out and only had $50 bucks left in it – the minimum that would keep the account open and not trigger an automatic message to me. But we only kept $25 grand that account for day-to-day operations, unless there was a specific need. Our larger account, where we usually kept about $100,000, Bruce didn’t have access to. I locked all the money in that account up so that no withdrawals could be made. Just in case. If this turned out to be a ‘much ado about nothing,’ I could remove the hold without anyone (except the bank) being any wiser for it.

As I drove down I95 past Cape Canaveral, Melbourne, to Vero, I thought back on my early life there on the Florida east coast.

My Grandfather had originally bought the grove property in the 40s. The land was cheap (he bought it during one of the ‘bust’ periods in Florida real estate, notorious for its ‘boom and bust’ cycles) and he bought a section — a square mile — of land about five miles inland from the Indian River lagoon. He built a typical sprawling Florida concrete block house (to fend off the termites) and planted the grove.

By the time I came along, Gramps and Grammy had moved to one of the new retirement villages, and our family moved into “the ranch house,” as we called it.

The grove itself was about half grapefruit and half orange varieties. We had white, pink and red marsh seedless grapefruit, and Hamlin, Temples, Pineapples (yeah — a variety of oranges called ‘pineapple’!) as well as the usual Red Navel, and Valencia oranges. We had a couple of rows of mandarin oranges, and a couple of Duncan seedy grapefruit as well, but those were just for local consumption. The varieties we grew meant that we had product from September (the Hamlins) to June (Valencias.)

I didn’t pay too much attention to things when I was growing up, like most kids, so I didn’t follow my elders learning the details of how to grow the citrus. I guess I absorbed a lot of it thru osmosis anyway.

Vero was a great place to grow up at the time: sandy beaches, sunny skies, plenty of tourist girls in brief swimsuits and lots of mischief to get into.

Most of my friends were into surfing. I thought it was okay, but I wasn’t big on it. I did love going out with the guys on boats from the Sabastian inlets, 10 or 20 miles out, deep sea fishing.

I grew up with a bunch of local boys who were pretty much like me, sons of families who owned citrus orchards.

We learned how to drive tractors, how to spray the trees with pesticides and fertilizers (these were the pre-organic days) and help our folks out during the harvest. That was not picking, we had crews that came in temporarily for that, but with forklifts we would pick up the 60/70 or 90 box crates and stack them up on semi-trailers to take the fruit to the processing plants (for juice) or to the packing plant where they were cleaned and boxed and shipped out as fresh fruit.

Bruce McWilliams and I were especially close. His dad didn’t own a grove, but he managed several groves for absentee owners. Bruce was planning on going to the University of Florida in Gainesville to get his Ag degree.

Don’t make fun of a modern Ag degree — it is half business, half chemistry and biology, half marketing, and half soils and animal husbandry. That’s in addition to all the general ed classes. In other words, an ag degree covers a lot of material. The modern farmer is taking on a difficult, albeit rewarding, task.

Anyway, Bruce’s family moved in when we were in 6^th grade, and from then on, through high school, he and I were best friends. We did the beach; we discovered the highs and lows of too much to drink. We double dated to the proms and took our dates virginities the same night. We shared a lot of experiences.

Bruce was taller than I was by about four inches until our junior year. He’d reached his full height by the time we were freshmen, but in our Junior year, I caught up with him, and we were looking eye-to-eye.

He was not only taller in the early years, but he had more heft. I was lean and wiry; Bruce was stocky and heavily muscled. While I ran cross-country and track, Dave was played center on the football team and catcher on the baseball team. Bruce’s activities made him one of the big men on campus. Mine, not so much.

Despite the differences, we remained close.

The third member of our little group, Pete Andrews, didn’t join us until eighth grade. Pete, now my lawyer, was the quiet one of the team, a bit more studious than Bruce or me. Pete lived about half-a-mile away from us with his parents in a home closer to the beach. He was an only child, and all he ever wanted was to be like his dad, who was a lawyer. Pete was one of the geeks in chess club, but he and I met in band, where he played trumpet, and I played clarinet and sax.

He soon joined Bruce and me having fun and getting into the kind of troubles that would get you arrested today but were considered to be normal teenage mischief back then. The cops back then might bring us home for our parents to give us a good whooping, but they wouldn’t criminally arrest us. Of course, we weren’t robbing convenience stores or shooting at people either. Catching a small (like four foot long!) alligator and putting it into the pool in front of City Hall? Yeah, we might have been the perps on that one.

My time in Vero came to an end, though, at the end of our senior year.

The grove was developed and running smoothly, so the family hired Bruce’s dad to manage the grove. Part of his compensation was that the McWilliams family lived rent free in the house on the grove. He continued to manage other groves as well, so he had a profitable little business going.

My mom and dad were still coming to town at least six or eight times a year for a week or more, keeping an eye on things, and they still enjoyed their friends and the area. In fact, they bought a beach house close by because they stayed there so often. Later on, I used the beach house when I was back in town. My wife and I came there after we got married, using it as a ‘second home.’ Claire loved it there and had her own circle of friends in town who she played tennis and socialized with at the country club when we were around.

As I was saying, after my senior year ended, we brought on Bruce’s dad to manage the operations on the grove, while my dad (in partnership with my grandfather) bought another two sections of land, this time in middle Tennessee.

My dad’s true specialty was raising certified Black and Red Angus cattle for beef. He and Mom moved up to Maury County, south of the county seat of Columbia, and set up their ranch.

Truthfully, Bruce, Pete and I wouldn’t have stayed together anyway.

Bruce went off in the Fall to Florida State, Pete went to Duke in North Carolina, and I went to Vanderbilt, in Nashville. Bruce, of course, was an Ag major, Pete was doing political science as a pre-law, followed by his law degree from Wake Forest, and I took an econ degree, followed by my MBA. Vanderbilt doesn’t have and undergrad business program, but the “Owen School,” their business grad school, is highly ranked.

Nevertheless, we all stayed in touch.

With Bruce, keeping in touch was easy, since his dad had taken over managing our grove. Any time that we came down to check on things, which was fairly frequently, the odds were that I would see Bruce.

Eventually, Bruce’s father retired, and Bruce took over the business. He was a respected grove manager, a seeming rarity in the world of scoundrels that made up the Florida citrus industry.

Pete and I didn’t see each other, but we communicated often and would see each other when school was off. After law school, Pete returned to Vero and became our lawyer. Mostly we saw him for social events; he promised not to charge for those.

When we reached Vero, I dropped Clair off, where she would unload our luggage (not much, since we kept clothes and sundries in both houses) and start arranging get-togethers with her local friends.

I continued driving to a local chain restaurant, where I had arranged to meet with Pete.

Pete was already seated when I arrived. He waved to me as I came in and I walked over and sat down.

“Well, I haven’t spoken directly to George this morning, but the word is amongst the real estate folks is that one of the development companies has purchased the grove.”

“Oh, shit! Well, we will put a stop to that today. The salesperson probably hasn’t even submitted the paperwork yet.”

“And by-the-way, Pete, the grove operations account was cleaned out to the minimum allowed last Friday. I put a lock on all the other accounts when I went on-line to check on the status.”