Chapter 1: Our Hero

David MacFarlane was 34 years old, and the kind of guy every kid in town wished they had for an uncle. And most of the kids in his small town knew him well, because of his volunteer work for the past 7 years at the local junior/senior high school as both an assistant swim team coach, and assistant girl’s volleyball coach. Under his coaching, the boy’s and girl’s swim teams and the girls’ volleyball team had been district champs every year for 6 years and had gone to the state championship meets twice each.

He’d also been a volunteer assistant football coach for the high school team in Dixie County for several years, coaching the Defensive Backs and Special teams, helping the team go to the Regional 2A Tournament the last 4 years he’d volunteered, including one Regional Championship. until the program had expanded enough two years ago to require three paid teacher-coaches, instead of one teacher-coach and whatever volunteers he could scrounge up.

One of the small jokes in town was that the local high school football team had not advanced to the District Championship, let alone reaching the Regional Tournament since David stopped coaching nearly three years ago.

Older folks in his small rural Florida town of Suwanee also remembered him as the man whose young wife and twin 3 yr. old daughters had been tragically killed ten years ago back in 1988, during a convenience store robbery. The tragedy happened when the store clerk came up with a semi-automatic handgun of his own and began wildly shooting at the robbers, but between the clerk’s and the robber’s wild shooting, they had killed all of David’s family instead.

When he was barely 19, David was a Junior in his Master’s degree program at UF when he married a woman who was 6 years older than he. Dr. Abigail MacFarlane (née Goldman) had met David when she was 25 and just beginning her internship at Shand’s Medical Center at the University of Florida. David was doing a hospital rotation there as part of his EMT-Advanced training in preparation for a long voyage to complete his Master’s Thesis. He and Abi had been completely smitten with each other, and over their parent’s objections had married just 8 weeks after that.

Nine months and nine days later, Abi had given birth to healthy twin girls, Sharon and Lois.

Abi had just finished her residency in obstetrics and gynecological surgery when, at the age of 30, she lost her life along with her daughters.

While the terms of the out-of-court legal settlement had been kept confidential, the truth was that convenience store’s insurance company had paid David a lump sum settlement of 20 million dollars for the death of Abi and an additional 5 million dollars for the death of each of his daughters. After paying off their two mortgages, buying all the land adjacent to their housing development and paying off Abi’s student loans, David had immediately invested the rest, which now provided him about $1.2 million dollars per year in pre-tax income.

Rather than live ostentatiously, David was content to continue to live alone in the same 5-bedroom house he’d built for his wife and family. After his parent’s death while he was in college, he’d sold his brother his interest in the very successful family business back in Texas and now worked as a freelance writer and occasional saltwater charter captain and fishing guide and occasional hunting guide.

Although born in West Palm Beach, Florida, his family had moved to Houston when he was 12, and he’d lived there until he came back to attend college at the University of Florida when he was only 16. He had finished his Bachelor’s degree in Oceanography when he was just 18, and his Master’s degree when he was 20 and had to leave school to raise his two young children.

His home sat on a 520-acre piece of property that most people would have though was just another 5-acre lot at the very end of a residential cul-de-sac, since his house was right up against the street like his neighbors. But behind his house and the homes of all his neighbors, what seemed like primordial forest was land that was all his. David had lots of land for walking and hunting when he cared to do so, especially since this land backed up to the Suwannee River. He even had a 42-acre spring-fed lake hidden from view that was naturally stocked with bream and large-mouth bass, and a rope swing hanging from a live-oak leaning out over the lake.

He also owned a house on the Withlacoochee River just a mile upstream from the Gulf of Mexico, just a couple of hours away down in Yankeetown, from which he did occasional work as a saltwater fishing guide, mostly just to spend time on the water and make new friends.