Despite his statue greeting people as they got off the boat—the only mode of transportation to the town—Henry Ford never actually visited the town himself. Fordlandia was a massive failure, and in 1945, his grandson sold the land back to the Brazilian government for a loss of twenty million dollars. No rubber was ever produced from the venture. A few people still lived in the dilapidated town, some of them descendants of the Brazilian workers.

"Wow," I said when we finished. "I had no idea about any of that."

"Me neither," said Sabrina, "but it looks like dozens of articles and even a book have been written about it. I guess we lead a sheltered life."

"So do you think Bruce was a worker there?" I asked. We had stopped calling him my great-grandfather and just referred to him as Bruce.

"He was involved in running illegal booze," replied Sabrina. "What if they were making shipments to the 'Island of Innocence'?"

"From the states? Would it be worth it?" I asked. "Couldn't they get it cheaper from Mexico, or pretty much anywhere down there?"

"Yeah, but as you reminded me, this was your relative."

She wasn't wrong. "But he worked for others," I said. "They would have sent him down. Wouldn't they have had enough brains to see the stupidity of that?"

"You're kidding, right?"

I shrugged. "Maybe they only made the one attempt before figuring out it wasn't going to be lucrative."

"So I think we now know where we need to go. Now the question is why?"

"And going back to my father's notes, what did he mean with all that about Mikey? And why did he stop there? It seemed he was on to something. I think we can assume he read the material in his attic. Maybe the fact that Mikey's body was never found bothered him."

I was getting no response from Sabrina. She was back at the computer.

Finally she said, "I was thinking the same thing, so I wanted to check something. You ready for this?"

"Probably not."

"As you said, your father had been dabbling with this for a long time. Up until the Mikey stuff, your father hadn't made any notes for over three years. Those last entries, however, were added only a week before he was shot. It seems the minute he got onto this new topic, he was killed."

I didn't know what to say. Even as I learned that the deaths of my grandfather and great-grandfather were in fact murder, I still assumed that my father's death was totally unrelated to all of this. Hell, it had to be. They had the woman's husband in jail. He admitted to it. So was it just coincidence? The trouble was, I no longer believed in coincidence. But this would be hard to explain any other way.

I sat staring at Sabrina. She let me stare. That was good, because I had nothing to say. What could I say?

"Fuck it," I finally said, throwing my hands in the air.