It was a hodgepodge of his own notes interspersed with pasted articles. It was one of the reasons I hadn't spent too much time looking through it. Frankly, it was boring. My initial impressions from when I first looked at it were definitely wrong though. This was not research for a book. Sabrina saw that immediately.

"A book has a certain feel to it," she said. "Even in the research stage, you have a sense of where the book is going. I don't mean you have the story figured out. Heck, I never know where my books are going. I just let the characters take the story. What I mean is, if you were to look at my early notes, you might not know exactly what the story is about, but you know that it's a story. You might mention a character's name or a piece of dialogue that you want to stick in it. If it was meant to be nonfiction, you'd sense a theme. This has none of that. It's just a hodgepodge of downloaded articles—or parts of articles. Also, if it was a book, there would be more than one file. You'd have separate files for dialogue, research, characters, etc. Not one big file."

His early notes seemed be generally about South America, but there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason. We read on … and on. His notes seemed endless, but they led nowhere. He jumped from topic to topic: idols, religious artifacts, jewels. Although he never used the term treasure, his notes intimated that it was where he was going. And then there was an abrupt switch. He stopped his research on South America and changed to Russia, pre-revolution.

"I don't get it," I finally said. "What just happened?"

"He's stuck."

"In what way?"

"He's brainstorming with himself," she said. "It's like when I get writer's block. Sometimes I will just jot things down, hoping it will get me going again. Your father was in the same spot we are. Well, not as far along as we are, but just as stuck. He suspected that the answer was in South America, but he hadn't pinpointed where. I'm not quite sure why he jumped over to Russia."

"How did he even know that South America played a part in this?" I asked.

"Deduction, I guess. He knew your great-grandfather was thrown out of South America and was trying to find a connection."

"Doesn't look like he found it."

"We're not done with it yet."

Truer words were never spoken. The breakthrough came twenty minutes later. I was in the bathroom when Sabrina yelled out, "Found something!"

I zipped up and quickly washed my hands.

"What did you find?" I asked as I took my seat next to her.

"It's not what I found, but what your father found. Look." She pointed to a line on the page.

"Did Mikey die? His body was never found."

"Where did that come from?" I asked.

"He must have found something. There's more." She was almost jumping in her seat with excitement. "But not much. It's interesting though."