“I can’t get you a STEWie run.”
“It would be quick, isn’t that true?”
“What would?”
“Going into the fourteenth century. Time zips by in the past but drags in the present, no? It’s a turtle here but a hare there when you compare clocks.”
“Something like that,” I said. So he did know something about the rules of time travel, because that was another one of them. Each hour spent in the past corresponded to only 133 ticks of the second hand on the lab clock. No one quite knew why.
“So we could get this pilot filmed and be back the same day, couldn’t we, Jules?”
“The answer’s no, Quinn,” I said firmly.
He leaned forward and took my hand. “Julia. The sooner we settle matters, the sooner I can sign the divorce papers. And do my best to keep Sabina’s story from going public, of course. Hey, do you want a spot on my new reality show? It could be arranged.”
At this point I might have been asking myself what I ever saw in the man, but I knew. He was a charmer, with his easygoing ways and handsome grin. His grand plans—like flipping houses in Arizona—and now this…well, it was just his way of doing things. He had hated his job as an accountant for the town’s electrical plant, the sameness of it day in and day out, but had given it a try for our sake, and I understood that. He had ultimately failed and, drawn by online photos of Phoenix bungalows and cactus gardens basking in perpetual sunshine, had left town with Officer Jones. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him, not even now. He was a disappointment to me—no more, no less.
“No, Quinn,” I said, letting go of his hand. “I can’t get you on a STEWie run. Not for a story passed down in your family, and certainly not for a reality show.”
He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I’m thinking of calling it History’s Dirty Secrets. I even have a tip on where I can get backing for the show. Wouldn’t it be something if I can prove that Farfar was right and that the Vikings really did come to the US? Once we film that, it’ll set the ball rolling, and we can move on to the JFK assassination, the Roswell Incident, and other mysteries…I’m full of ideas.”
I tried a different approach. “Look, I don’t know that what you have in mind is even possible. Big questions and important people are often the hardest to tackle. It’s just how time travel works.”
He grinned at me and got to his feet, cheerfully unhooking the frog umbrella from the chair back, not looking discouraged in the least by my refusal. Listening had never been one of his stronger characteristics. “Take the weekend to think about it, Jules. I’ll be in touch. I’m staying at Lena’s Lodge—unless you’d be willing to let me sleep on the couch?”
“I don’t think so.”
3
I was dialing the phone before the door had closed behind Quinn. Helen answered after the second ring. The no-nonsense historical linguist had been on many a STEWie run, including the Pompeii one. She was well known for having proven that Shakespeare did write his plays, by returning from a run to Bishopsgate in 1590s London with some well-shot footage. She was a senior professor with research interests that included, in addition to Shakespeare, classical Latin and Greek. She was also a good friend.
I told her everything.
“I hope I did the right thing in sending Quinn away, Helen,” I said, switching the phone to my left hand so that I could reach into the cookie jar for the last of the fudge mints. “I’m not sure what to do. I can’t get him a STEWie run like he wants, but we can’t let him expose Sabina either. It’s hard enough to be the new kid in school. Imagine how mercilessly she’ll get teased if the other kids find out that she’s from the first century. And if the media gets a hold of the story…”
Though every historian at St. Sunniva University would have given an arm and a leg to sit Sabina down and hear what life had been like for an ordinary person in the ancient Roman Empire, something that rarely made it into the accounts that had survived into the present before STEWie, we had agreed that privacy trumped academics. Sabina had not asked to be brought here, and we were not going to make a celebrity out of her. If she decided to share her story with the world when she was older—well, that would be her choice.
“You did the right thing, Julia.” Helen’s voice, trained by years of classroom lecturing, carried strong through the line. “And if he does break the news—well, the truth was bound to come out one day. When it does, Sabina will be fine. There might be some awkwardness for us here at St. Sunniva about how the whole thing was handled, but we’ll deal with it. Why does Quinn care about finding the runestone anyway? Historical finds rarely make anyone rich.”
Helen knew Quinn somewhat, having met him at a few of the school functions we’d attended as a couple.
“He seems to think the runestone would make a great pilot for a time travel reality TV show with him as the star,” I explained.
“It might, I suppose, though I would have thought the JFK assassination or something of that sort would be more marketable. It’s the first idea that people always bring up.”
“He’s saving that for a future episode. His grandfather played a role in digging up the stone, so he thinks that makes it perfect for the pilot.”
“I see.”
I slid the lid into its place over the empty cookie jar. “If Quinn asked for money so he could finance the reality show, I might have given him some. But not this, not an off-the-books STEWie run.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Julia. Still, I suppose we should prepare Sabina just in case. We can talk more about it this evening.”
I was hosting a get-together of our Pompeii family to celebrate Sabina’s first week of high school. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t bring it up, Helen. I don’t want to ruin Sabina’s party. Plus, I don’t want…uh, the others to know that Quinn is in town.”
“How are things between you and Chief Kirkland, anyway? Has he asked you out yet?”
Nate and I had formed a friendship on the Pompeii run, but that was the extent of it. I obviously still had some Quinn-related issues, and Nate had personal stuff he needed to work through as well. At least we’d come back from Pompeii with him calling me Julia instead of Ms. Olsen. It was progress. He had been gone most of the summer, which was quiet time at the school, on a team-building retreat. I hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July picnic.
“There’s nothing going on between us,” I said into the phone. “Besides, he just got back.”
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said Helen, who was given to quoting the Bard at odd moments. “Do you need me to bring anything tonight other than the balloons?”
“Let me check.” I moused the computer to life, closed the orientation booklet I had been working on, and opened the party to-do list. I’d already crossed off most of the items on it. “We’re looking good, if the weather clears up. I’m picking up the cake on the way home, and Nate is bringing the burgers.”
Cooking and I did not mix, even on outdoor grills, so Nate’s offer of being the designated chef was a welcome one.
“See you tonight, Julia—oh, wait, I have an idea. I should have thought of it immediately when you mentioned the runestone. Why don’t you send Quinn to talk to Dagmar?”
“Who is she?”
“Dr. Dagmar Holm is a postdoc here in the department, a runic linguist. She might be able to explain to Quinn why the runestone story is just a myth—a popular one, but a myth nonetheless. Maybe he’ll accept an objective opinion better than a refusal from you.”
“I’ll see if I can catch him.”
“I’ll let Dagmar know.”
I hung up the phone and stuck my head out the window. The rain had tapered off. Quinn was in the courtyard, leaning on the frog umbrella as he chatted with a female graduate student. I thought I saw the dean’s straight back and black umbrella in the throng of students milli
ng in and out of the courtyard on their way to class, so I waited until she had disappeared into the building before calling out Quinn’s name.
He turned in my direction, said something no doubt charming to the graduate student, and took a few steps over to the still-dripping white birch outside my office window. “Did you change your mind, Jules?”
“No. But there’s someone I want you to talk to. Her name is Dr. Dagmar Holm and she works in the English Department.” I pointed to the square cement building, somewhat of a campus eyesore, which squatted by the bend in the lake. Though everyone called it the English Department, its official name was the Department of Classical, Medieval, and Modern Languages. “She’ll be expecting you.”
“Julia, is there a problem?”
I waved Quinn along and turned from the window. The dean had poked her head in on the way to her office next door. Formerly of the Earth Sciences Department, Dr. Isobel Braga was a geologist by training and my new boss. She was not one of the few people who knew the whole Pompeii story.
“Just a personal matter,” I explained. I grabbed the stack of referral letters that needed her signature from my desk and accompanied her to her office. “How was the meeting?”
Dean Braga had been showing potential donors around the History Alive exhibit at the campus museum. The exhibit represented the fruits of the STEWie project. One of its star attractions was a somewhat blurry photo, enlarged and taken from behind a bush, showing the muscular, tanned, and bearded builders of Stonehenge in prehistoric Britain. In another corner of the exhibition hall, heartbreaking footage of the sinking Titanic taken from a time-traveling buoy looped in ten-minute intervals.
Dean Braga deposited her black umbrella with perhaps slightly more force than necessary in the coat rack just inside the door. “It didn’t go terribly well. I think I just wasted an hour.”
“They weren’t impressed with the exhibit?”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. They’ve heard that MIT is constructing a bigger STEWie.”
That happened to be true.
“But bigger is not necessarily—”
“—better, yes. I tried to get the point across that the reason we’ve had trouble getting near primary historical figures is because of History’s constraints, not any fault on our part, and that MIT will face the same problems.” She dropped into the leather chair behind her desk and shook her head.
“They always ask why we don’t try again the next day and the day after and the day after that, as if each STEWie run isn’t such a large drain on energy and resources. I explained that research is never easy and that results rarely just fall into one’s lap—that confirming who shot JFK, which seemed to be their main interest,” she said, echoing what Helen had said moments earlier, “will take longer than the months of planning that the Department of American History has already put into the project. Hiding a fleet of cameras around Dealey Plaza is no easy task. And we have to make sure that the people placing them and retrieving go under the radar, too.”
“Did you explain that maneuvering in a time period not your own is ‘like navigating a maze?’ ” I asked, quoting Dr. Rojas of the TTE lab, who was on a well-deserved sabbatical, having gone through the stress of being wrongfully accused of murder. “That our researchers cannot always go where they want to, not to mention that there are ghost zones to worry about?”
“I’m not sure I got the point across. This salesman side of being a dean is going to take some getting used to. Their other idea—really not an original one to suggest to a geologist—was to go back in time to film the dinosaurs. The energy expenditure to go that far back, not to mention the danger to our researchers, the unknown factors they would encounter…I mean, the air itself was different.” She shook her head wearily, slid on her reading glasses, and held her hand out for the referral letters. She commenced reading the top one. After her predecessor, Lewis Sunder, had been arrested for sending five of us into a ghost zone and trying to frame Dr. Rojas, I’d joked that the new dean, whoever it turned out to be, could not be worse.
Dean Braga came close. Lewis Sunder had preferred to leave the day-to-day running of the dean’s office in my hands, dedicating himself to fundraising and to addressing the big issues, like whether theoretical researchers needed bigger offices than experimentalists, who also had lab space. Dean Braga attended to the details of STEWie roster assignments, funding requests, and conference travel forms with the same zeal she would have given a particularly interesting rock specimen in her career as a geologist. Saying she micromanaged did not do justice to the fervor with which she followed the path of every penny in the eight science departments under her care and checked every signature on every piece of paper. I hoped it was a temporary stage and would pass once she settled into her new role.
“You said you were dealing with a personal matter, Julia?” she asked, checking the figures in the letter against her notes.
I had considered telling Isobel about Sabina after she took up the post of dean, but was concerned that she’d think it her duty to tell the world. And she’d no doubt be furious with us for breaking time travel protocols.
“That was my ex,” I explained. “My soon-to-be-ex husband, actually. There were some matters we needed to settle.”
She took a pen and applied her signature to the first of the letters. “Let’s try to keep personal matters outside of work hours, shall we? Now, about the first pass at the spring class schedule…”
By mid-afternoon, I had rearranged some chemistry lab sections in the spring semester class catalog as requested by Dean Braga, helped a foreign student dealing with a visa problem, and listened to a phone message from a sophomore who had completely forgotten to turn in her final essay (“On the Early History of Weather Prediction”), but the professor who had taught the summer class had already gone on a sabbatical and was not answering her calls, so she had e-mailed the essay to me instead, and could I please forward it to him so that she’d get a passing grade—all of this even though the deadline had long since passed and the fall semester had already started. I jotted down a note to deal with it later in the day. Quinn’s words—“I’m planning on plastering Sabina’s story all over the Internet if you don’t help me prove the runestone is real”—kept running through my mind as I filled out budget forms. Finally, I decided I’d had enough. Dean Braga wanted personal matters kept out of the office and so did I. The best way to accomplish that was to make sure that Dr. Holm had been able to convince Quinn that his plan was unrealistic.
Besides, I wanted the matter settled before Sabina’s party tonight.
I looked up Dr. Holm’s contact information in the internal campus database, hesitated, then sent her a text message introducing myself and asking if she’d be available for a short chat.
She texted back, Am in Coffey Library, in the stacks, come by.
I found Dr. Holm between a pair of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the library. Hardcover books lay open all around her, and one was nestled in her lap. She was, I guessed, in her late twenties, with fine auburn hair held back by a sky-blue hairband. I’ve been told often enough that I look young for my age, but Dr. Holm took it to a whole new level. The tip of her tiny nose turned to one side ever so slightly, which, coupled with the small ears that held the blue headband in place, made her look like an erudite pixie as she bent over the textbook. Above black leggings and flats, she had on an oversized white T-shirt with photos of a Viking ship on the front and back.
“Sorry to disturb you,” I said in the measured tone everyone automatically adopts in libraries. “I’m Julia Olsen, assistant to Dean Braga over in the science departments.”
She looked up, blinking to adjust from reading printed materials in the low library light, and nimbly sprang to her feet and shook my hand. She was petite, as befitted a pixie, and had a suitably high-pitched voice. “Pleased to meet you. Y
ou’re the one who went on that accidental run into far time, aren’t you? Let me put these books away and maybe we can grab a smoothie or something? I went for a jog this morning, and I’m famished.”
I wasn’t into jogging. In my opinion, people who jog always look like they’re suffering—it’s not often that you see a smiling jogger—but I could see how it would make a person hungry.
“Nice T-shirt,” I said as we headed out of the library to the student café next door. The photos printed onto the front and back of the custom-made T-shirt had been taken from shore. One showed a long and agile wooden vessel with a dragon figurehead on the prow, a single mast, and tightly packed, bareheaded figures expertly manning the oars. The other showed a workhorse vessel, its open cargo hold overflowing with cattle, sheep, and other goods as it sailed away to unknown lands.
“Thanks. The one the front is a longship, used for raiding. The one on the back is a knarr, a cargo ship of the kind used to settle Iceland and Greenland. The photos were taken by Dr. May on her runs to eleventh-century Europe. The longships were up to thirty-five meters in length. They were sturdy enough for long sea voyages, yet shallow enough to navigate up rivers as well.” The academic language made for a strange partnership with her girlish voice. “Most people think the Vikings wore horned helmets, but as you can see, they didn’t.”
After she got her smoothie and I got a caffeinated pop, we wound our way through tables where students sat engrossed in their various electronic devices nursing coffees and energy drinks, only a few of them carrying on conversations.
“Dr. Holm, I don’t want to take up too much of your time…” I said once we sat down, having chosen an inside table since the outside ones were still wet from the rain. Realizing that I didn’t even know for sure that she and Quinn had spoken, I suddenly felt foolish.
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 2
