I found myself excited and scared at the same time. I hadn't traveled much in my life, and had only been out of the country a couple of times. But those were planned trips. This was altogether different. Not only was I going to a completely foreign place, I wasn't even totally sure why. Add to that Mario Guidry and the Russians, and I felt about as unprepared as one could be.

We returned to the airport two hours before our flight to Belém. When we were researching the trip we noticed that Santarém was closer to Fordlandia than Belém and had a busy airport. However, we decided against it for one main reason: Sabrina wanted to reenact the trip the four stooges took. Fordlandia was accessed only by river boat and a good portion of the river looked much the way it did eighty-five years ago. She wanted the full experience, not an abbreviated version.

"If we're going to do this, we need to do it right," she said by way of explanation. "We should get a feel for what they went through."

I had heard of mystery writers who never left the comfort of their homes. Sabrina was not one of them … by a long shot. I was coming to realize that mystery writing was just an extension of who she was—or more accurately, who she wanted to be. She wanted to feel the excitement she wrote about in her novels. Maybe it was because she lost six years of her life and wanted to make up the time. Maybe she just came to understand that living life to the fullest was what it was all about. I was beginning to understand why her books were taking off. It wasn't just her writing ability, it was her passion. When I was researching her, I had run across numerous reviews of her books. The word passion came up a lot. Maybe I would be able to find some of that passion myself.

*****

We arrived in Belém without incident. To the best of our knowledge she wasn't recognized on the flight, maybe because there were few Americans on board. I heard a lot of what I assumed to be Portuguese being spoken.

Belém was a modern city. It was actually kind of a shock. We kind of expected it to look like it did in the early 1900s, but when we passed our first Starbucks we were pretty sure that wasn't the case. Would Fordlandia turn out to be a theme park? No, that much we knew. Fordlandia was a ghost town, inhabited mostly by squatters.

We hadn't had a lot of time to research the river travel before we left, but had done some on the plane. There were numerous tourist-oriented boat trips down the Amazon, which we wanted to steer clear of. We were searching for something small, partly for the "Mikey experience" and partly for the anonymity. How quickly would word get out the minute some American tourists recognized Sabrina? After making numerous inquiries of locals—luckily most people we encountered spoke English—we were directed to a small family-owned boat.