chapter one

Almost a Virgin



Chapter 1:



It was the chance of my young lifetime; the story of that would make my career. More than that, it would give me the fabulous opportunity to spend my New Years Eve in one of the most romantic and exotic places in the world, and at the company’s expense. At least that’s the way my boss tried to sell it to me as he pushed my airlines tickets, a new laptop computer, a company credit card, a large envelope of cash and a sketch (including photos) of the subject of my story. Actually I think what he was really saying, (and here you can call me a cynic, if you want to) was that if I ever wanted to get any of my work published by his firm, I had better take the assignment. I think also, that the only reason he wanted me to take the assignment was that I was the only one in the office who had ever studied Spanish or would even think of going to Brazil during the holiday season. I had had four years of it (Spanish, that is) in high school, but that was five or six years previously and what I actually remembered of it wouldn’t fill a thimble. I guess I had been pretty stupid to list it on my resume when I applied for the job, but I had been feeling a little bit insecure at the time and figured that it might make me a little more marketable. I shouldn’t have bothered. There are only two requirements for working at Spectrum Publishing. You have to be able to stand up and to be able to see the clock to know when it’s time run toward home at night. At five o’clock I’m an athlete with 20/20 vision.

         Well, I had a little more than two weeks to cram all the Spanish I could into my head so I ran out after the office closed for the day and bought a new Spanish/English dictionary and a set of tapes that sounded promising. Then I hurried home to start boning up on my language skills and sorting out my best winter clothes to pack. I also made a list of all the things in my wardrobe that would need replaced or augmented. This was really quite a simple thing to do as everything needed replaced and there’s not a lot that one can do to augment Garfield and Scooby-Doo Underoos. I hear that they just aren’t exactly in style anymore. Secondly, came new winter clothing. A lot of my old things looked as though they had been through four years of high school and an additional four years of college with me. As a matter of fact, most of them had been. Besides that (now this may be straining my fashion sense to the limits) the idea of traveling halfway around the world wearing a threadbare, moth-eaten snow-mobile suit which has the stuffing peeking out of the seams and is covered with nasty looking stains from cleaning my boyfriend’s fish for six or seven years and the green and black plaid Klondike style winter hat with pull down ear flaps that I’d gotten for my thirteenth birthday didn’t even sound appealing to me, so with some reluctance I decided to leave them behind.          

Somehow I got through the two weeks surrounding Christmas working days and studying and shopping nights and finally found myself clad in my spiffy, new, gray and red wool tweed traveling suit and puffy, red eyes (which matched my fluffy new red wool neck scarf) boarding the plane which would take me from the Twin Cities to Dallas, Texas where I would make the connecting flight straight to São Paulo, Brazil. Imagine my chagrin when I stepped off the plane in São Paulo and found out that even if I had studied Spanish for ten years it wouldn’t have prepared me for Brazil. They speak Portuguese there. Not only that, but of all the really great winter clothes which I had bought to fill out my travel wardrobe, the only things which would be marginally useful would be the underwear because it was the middle of summer and though the temperatures when I left home had been well into the minus degrees with a strong wind, in São Paulo it was about ninety-five degrees in the shade with no sign of a breeze anywhere. Go figure.

I looked down at my spiffy new, grey and red wool tweed travel suit which had already begun to droop with sweat and then ruefully at my three overstuffed suitcases, sitting like the “Three Bears” (one small, one medium and one large) on the push cart beside me and stuffed to the gills with more new winter clothing and sighed bitterly.

Even with the disappointment of knowing that I would have very little use for anything that I had in my bags, other than possibly my toothbrush, wasn’t enough to daunt Sherry Olafson. (By the way, that’s me.) I am a Viking (or at least of Viking stock) and I was in Brazil on my first big assignment. Actually, it was my first assignment of any size. Since I’d graduated from Lake Superior University with a degree in journalism two years previously I had been basically unemployed until I landed the job with Spectrum. That was three months ago. Since then I’ve been the office gofer, coffee maker, pencil sharpener and trash emptier. Sometimes they’ve even let me answer the phone, but only if everyone else is busy or in the bathroom. That’s why I said earlier that I figured that the only reason that I got this assignment was that I was probably the only one in the office who would take it.

Wow, Brazil! I was actually in Brazil! A little thrill of excitement went through me and I squared my shoulders and looked around the airport trying to see if something exotic or tropical was going to jump out at me and say boo. Nothing did. Actually, it didn’t look a whole lot different from anything else that I’d ever seen. There was a sign telling me where I could find the McDonalds restaurant, the bathroom and a can of Coke. I sighed again.

         After some thought, I figured that it would be nice to actually see some of the country, instead of just passing over it, so rather than catching a connecting flight to somewhere else and then hopping on a bus or a camel (or whatever they have in Brazil) to the end of my journey, I would just hire a car at the airport to take me on to my final destination in the state of Minas Gerais. After all, Brazil couldn’t be all that big anyway, so how far could it be? Besides that, I hoped that by going by car I may even be able to stop somewhere along the way and purchase some more suitable clothing, such as anything at all that was a hell of a lot cooler than wool tweed. Once I arrived in the small city of Tiradentes I was to be met by a jeep or something, which would take me up into the mountains to the country estate where I would at last meet the subject of my assignment, one Ms. Victoria Sheehan.

         I was extremely lucky in that the car that I finally managed to hire was owned and driven by a man who spoke English fairly well. He assured me that we would be able to stop and shop on the way, and that the trip shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. The operative word here, I think, was shouldn’t. I’m not sure exactly where he learned to tell time, but the trip actually took almost seven hours from the time we left the airport until the time we pulled up to a gas station in Tiradentes including the hour or so we stopped at Wal-Mart (of all places) in some city along the way, where he helped me with my shopping. I was so grateful for his help in the store that I offered to treat him to lunch at the McDonalds just down the street where I immediately went into the ladies room and changed clothes.

         As the black Chevrolet eased back out onto the highway and began to pick up speed I opened my shoulder satchel and extracted my shiny new notebook computer and flipped the cover open. I thumbed the switch and watched as the little monitor in the lid began to flash numbers at me. After a few seconds it lit up all the little pictures on the screen and I rolled the little thingy on the keyboard to move the arrow to the word processor symbol and was greeted by a pristine white screen. I opened the file for Victoria Sheehan and began to read it through again.

         Born in suburban New Orleans, the only child of a high society couple, Victoria had been orphaned by a car crash at the age of four. The courts had awarded guardianship to her mother’s sister, Veronica, an extravagant social climber, and her husband Jordan Bradley, a prominent trial lawyer. According to the report, her Aunt and Uncle had been too busy at the time to travel south to pick her up and she had been taken to Shreveport, La. by a state social worker, who delivered her into the care of the Aunt’s housekeeper.

Sometime during her early teens she was suddenly sent away to an all girls boarding school in Little Rock, Arkansas that was noted for its discipline. For no reason that had ever been made clear she was asked to leave the school less than a year later. She then entered public school and finally graduated and entered college in Little Rock. Four years later, at the age of twenty-three, she graduated with honors with a degree in pre-law and went on to receive her law degree from the same school.

Following her bar exams she returned to Shreveport and entered her Uncle’s law firm where she rapidly worked her way into a full partnership. Two years later, involved in a scandal, which reached epoch proportions in the press and threatened to rock the political structure of the states of both Louisiana and Arkansas she suddenly disappeared. It was rumored that to avoid having the scandal dragging the family’s good name into the mud (and the possible risk of federal prosecution) she was sent by her Aunt and Uncle to “oversee” the plantation estate abroad which she had inherited from her parents until it all blew over and that was the last anybody had heard of her for several years until, like an explosion, her best selling biography hit the shelves.

         I turned off the computer and closed the cover with one hand while I massaged my tired eyes with the other and yawned. “How much further?” I asked the driver.

         “Como?”

         “How much further do we have to go?”

         He gave a slightly perceptible shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

         I yawned again and leaned back on my seat and closed my eyes. That was the last thing I remembered of the trip to Tiradentes.

         As the driver pulled the car into the gas station he nudged my arm with his hand and told me that it was time to wake up. We had arrived. I opened my eyes to see a big red and white Esso sign staring at me. On the other side of the pumps sat a large black Chevy Blazer. It was as though I had never left home and the sight of familiar things made me feel a lot less homesick.

The door or the blazer opened and a short, muscular looking man wearing blue jeans and a neatly ironed, white tee shirt got out and approached our car. “Dona Sherry?” he asked as he reached my open window.

My driver noted my groggy countenance and confused look and answered for me. “Yes it is.”

The small man handed me a note. “Hello, this is José, my driver. I asked him to bring you to the house. I have made accommodations here for you, so you don’t have to worry about finding a room there in town. Please excuse me for not meeting you personally. Sincerely, V.S.

The man then turned and spoke quietly with my driver and then handed him an envelope.

“How much do I owe you for the bill?” I asked.

“Your account has already been paid,” he answered as he looked up from the envelope.

It was beginning to look to me as though this might not be such a bad assignment.

“You’ve been so nice, can I give you a tip?”

My driver smiled broadly. “If you want to, but it isn’t necessary.

“Well like I said, you’ve been very nice and a great help to me with the shopping. Can I give you this?” I asked pulling a crisp one hundred dollar bill out of the little packet my boss had given me and handed it to him.

I have no idea what the exchange rate is from U.S. Dollars to Brazilian currency, but from the smile he gave me I guessed that he thought he hadn’t done very badly at all. He also gave me his business card and assured me that I could always call him anytime I needed the services of his car.

Thanking him, I turned toward my new driver who had already loaded my bags, including my plastic Wal-Mart bags, into the back of the Blazer and was holding the door open for me to get in.

I got into the car and he walked around and got behind the wheel, started the engine and, as we drove out of the gas station, I turned and waved at my old driver. José, turned the large car expertly this way and that through the city’s narrow cobble stone streets, passing the brightly painted doors of ancient looking houses and churches. It wouldn’t have been much of an issue if one of my requests had been to take our time so that I could see the city sights. The streets were littered with tourists and horse drawn taxis which meandered along with their drivers pointing out various colonial buildings and landmarks and telling the history of the city so there was plenty of time for me to look around. Even at that, it didn’t take us long to leave the busy streets behind, and from then on it wasn’t very far to my hostess’s estate, a sprawling stretch of acreage fronted by a low stone wall and dotted with fruit trees and bushes. Here and there also stood tall, majestic looking palm trees. There was a crunching sound as of tires on gravel as the car turned slowly into a long lane and passed under a wide arched gate. Near at hand a small white cottage lay nestled in a shady thicket of trees, and I could see a much larger house sitting among several tall trees on the other side of a large pond. The area beyond the house was tree covered and green and the air coming through the car window was filled with late afternoon sunshine and the sound of strange birds. It smelled fresh and alive. Nearing the house, I could see large clusters of ripening bananas hanging from some of the broad leafed trees, flashing a yellowing contrast to the red tiled roof beyond.

As we were rolling to a stop in front of the house a woman, whom I assumed was my hostess, stepped down off of the veranda and began walking toward the car. She moved toward us with an unconscious grace that really made me glad that I had decided to ditch the snow mobile suit after all. As she neared the car I could see that her breathtakingly beautiful face matched perfectly the photos, which I had received with my brief. It was Victoria Sheehan.

Opening the door, I tried to match her grace as I swung my legs from the car and struggled to rise, however the long hours of forced inactivity had left me feeling stiff. What was more, as my feet touched the driveway a familiar tingling sensation informed me, to my horror, that my legs and feet had gone to sleep from sitting for so long. When I tried to stand they crumpled under me like they were made of rubber and I fell back onto the seat and floundered there in my helplessness with all the grace of a cow which had gotten itself stuck in deep mud. I could have wept for mortification. As I sat there waiting for the tingling to stop in my feet and legs, I could feel my embarrassment rising up my neck and crossing my cheeks in a hot red blush.