"Why didn't Mikey go back for it?"

"In Fordlandia?"

It ended there.

"What the heck is Fordlandia?" I asked. "What?"

Sabrina was laughing.

"Do you know something I don't?"

"No," she answered, wiping her eyes. "It's just funny. We’ve been sitting here for almost three hours, and the answer comes on the last page. If your father figured it out, wouldn't it have been nice of him to delete the rest of the notes? No, instead, he makes us slog through pages and pages of nonsense. Two keystrokes would have saved us three hours of agony.

"Well, he was a Honeycutt," I offered.

"Obviously." She was looking at me with a funny expression.

"What?"

"You don't see it?"

"See what?"

"I can wait." Oh, she was having fun with this. I was missing something obvious and she was going to torture me until I found it. I looked back at the computer screen.

It was obvious. So obvious.

"Fordlandia," I finally said. "Lando Ford."

"The picture was only part of the clue," she said. "The artist's name was the other."

"But what does Fordlandia mean?"

She was way ahead of me. She was Googling it.

When the result came on the screen, the answer became clear.

"We're going to Brazil," Sabrina said.

Chapter 23

Fordlandia. A fascinating story that somehow they neglected to mention in history class. It was too bad, really, because a story like that was so much more interesting than most of the snooze material I was taught.

We spent the next couple of hours immersing ourselves in the history of Fordlandia through the many articles that had been written on the subject.

It was the brainchild of Henry Ford. Built in 1928 on the banks of the Rio Tapajós river, Ford bought up 3900 square miles of remote Amazon rainforest with the idea that he would produce his own rubber for his car tires. Whether the idea was a good one or not was questionable, but it really didn't matter, because the execution made it all moot. It was a poorly thought out and mismanaged plan from the very beginning.

Besides being clueless about growing and caring for rubber trees, whoever was in charge of the project knew nothing about culture and the cultural differences between Americans and the native rainforest Brazilians. In an attempt to make the American workers' home so far away from home seem more familiar, they modeled the town after a contemporary U.S. town, completely mimicking U.S. life. They paved the streets and constructed houses that you would see in the heart of middle America—with running water, sewage lines, and street lights. Lawns were mowed and flowers planted. They provided the workers with the food—hamburgers, hot dogs, and such—that they were used to. They held dances and barbeques, church services, and ice cream socials. The familiar life, if you were an American, that is. Many of the workers, however, were locals, not used to eating such rich fare or having to conform to American life. But it was a requirement. Ford also banned alcohol, loose women, gambling, and other vices from the town—even in the privacy of their own homes. The natural result was the establishment of a community—nicknamed the Island of Innocence—eight miles upriver that promoted all of the missing vices. Needless to say, Fordlandia was a complete failure in every respect. In addition to the collapsing business, crime ran rampant throughout the town, and the local workers revolted in 1930. Although the revolt was quashed, the conflicts continued to the very end.