“I suppose I can give the salmon burgers a shot. In here.” I slid the deck door open and he followed me into the kitchen. “How was the team-building retreat?”
“Good. And your summer?”
He was not a particularly chatty person, as if he was the one with the Norwegian ancestry instead of me. His own ancestry was wonderfully mixed, which had resulted in a uniquely appealing set of features, I had to admit—from his jet black hair and eyes to his height. He was so tall and lanky that his campus security uniform probably needed to be specially made. I had always meant to ask him about that.
“Sabina started school this week, right?” he added. “How’s she liking it?”
“She hasn’t said much about it,” I explained. “I think she’s reserving judgment.”
“Well, it is high school, and she is the new kid.”
I sighed. “I know. That rarely goes well for anybody.”
Having left the food by the sink, we went back out onto the deck, where Nate turned his attention to lighting the charcoal. Sabina and Abigail had returned with the Frisbee and Sabina twisted it in her hands as, with a mixture of relief and pride, she launched into an account of her first week at school. “This puella—girl—she called me ‘pizza lover,’ ” Sabina mimicked, her accent (which seemed to be diminishing day by day) only adding to the tale.
I wasn’t happy that someone had teased her, but at least it sounded like the back story we had come up with, that she was an immigrant from Italy living with Cousin Abigail and Aunt Julia, had been accepted without question. Besides, it was sort of true. “Just try to ignore remarks like that,” I said, moving the deck chairs into the shade. The rain had cleared up, leaving behind a strong afternoon sun. Summer had continued seamlessly into September, and the heat had yielded a fresh crop of boxelder bugs. The black bugs, with their familiar red markings, coated the sunny side of the house, harmless nuisances that they were.
Sabina ignored the chairs and hopped up onto the deck railing. “I wasn’t offended. I like pizza, this is true, no?”
“I can go to school with you if you’d like. I’ll punch anybody who needs it,” Kamal announced, edging his deck chair deeper into the shade. The senior graduate student, who was not athletic in the least and would probably sprain a finger if he did punch anybody, added, “Happy to do it.”
“Not to worry, Kamal. I can handle. And I made friend. Kim. She nice.” Sabina fingered the amulet hanging from a thin chain around her neck, a crescent moon made of orange-brown amber. The amulet was a lunula—a symbol of Diana, the goddess of the moon, the hunt, and childbirth. It was Sabina’s one link to home and a source of great strength for her. I hoped she wouldn’t get teased about the odd piece of jewelry at school.
An overweight scruffy dog waddled up the deck steps and curled into a ball by her feet, which she was energetically swinging from her perch on the railing. Celer had also returned with us from Pompeii. The leisure-loving dog’s name, pronounced with a hard k, meant Speedy in what was clearly intended as a joke. Celer’s opposite in personality and looks was Wanda, who was currently chasing a squirrel up the oak tree that shaded the deck, her tongue hanging to one side. While Celer was grayish and of indeterminate ancestry, Wanda’s silken white-and-chestnut coat could have won her a dog contest. Nate had inherited her from a previous case, back when he had worked in law enforcement in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, by the Canadian border.
“Wanda, behave yourself,” he called out, then went back into the house to prepare the food.
Sabina, watching Wanda, commented, “Most hard word…sk—skoo…”
“Sqwo-ral,” Kamal said helpfully. His parents were diplomats, and he spoke four languages fluently, including his native Arabic.
“Skoo-ral.” Sabina added, “I forgot to say. We get in school—what is it…lah-kers, yes.”
“Shoot, sorry, I forgot to explain about those,” Abigail said. The two had bonded during the few days we had spent in the past, and their bond had only grown stronger in the four months since our return. “Did you get a combination for it?”
“Yes, three numbers. I memorize.”
Abigail’s short hair changed color so frequently that Sabina and I joked that it was like living with a different person each week. The current, somewhat odd shade of green made her look rather like a hungry insect as she untwisted the top of a salsa jar. Sabina hopped off the railing and, following Abigail’s example, tentatively scooped up some salsa with a corn chip. She looked at it for a moment, then popped the whole thing in her mouth.
“Good,” she said after some crunching.
“I know, right? Julia and I bought something new for you to try for dessert, too—cheesecake. It’s yummy. Not for you, Celer, sorry,” Abigail added as the dog stirred at the familiar word. “It’s made from chocolate, which, as you found out, is bad for dogs.”
Chocolate, corn, pizza—these were all newfound tastes for Sabina (and Celer); the Roman world of their time had been a place of grapes, figs, and olive oil. I felt a twinge of sadness as I watched the girl dig into the chips and salsa, wondering if she missed Pompeii fare like the flavorful goat stew we’d eaten with hearty bread, or the pungent but popular Roman sauce garum. Her father had manufactured it in large sunken jars in the garden behind his shop, just next to the pear tree, by fermenting fish for months at a time. Well, it wasn’t likely we’d be able to duplicate that one, but the others we could try at future get-togethers. I headed back inside, sliding the screen door behind me quickly so that no boxelder bugs could get into the house.
Nate was by the kitchen sink with his sleeves rolled up as he popped vegetable chunks onto metal skewers. I offered to help him prepare the food and received a friendly chuckle in return. “For everybody’s safety, perhaps you’d better not. Some things are best left to the chef.”
“Hey, I’m only dangerous to the food, not to my guests.”
“You want to do the wine?”
“I was about to.”
As I reached for a bottle of red wine on the countertop, the front door opened and Helen hurried in, maneuvering a thick bunch of balloons in with her.
“Sorry I’m late, Julia. My lecture ran longer than I expected, then I had to stop to pick up these. I wasn’t sure which would be the most suitable for Sabina’s first week of school in the twenty-first century, so I got them all. Hello, Chief Kirkland. How was your retreat?”
“Good. And your summer, Professor?” Nate asked from the sink.
“Most productive. I managed to recover a copy of Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio.”
“Well done.”
“Is Dr. Mooney with you, Helen?” I asked. I hoped she would remember to not let it slip that Quinn was back in town. “I thought he was coming.”
“Xavier texted to say he got held up at the conference and missed his plane. He was showing them his new and improved Slingshot.” She tossed her silver hair, which she kept long for STEWie runs to Shakespeare’s time, behind her shoulder with her free hand as if she was irritated at Xavier for changing his plans without consulting her. Xavier Mooney was a senior professor of Time Travel Engineering. He and Helen had been married once, and our shared Pompeii ordeal had rekindled their somewhat stormy relationship. The Slingshot was the laptop-size device that the professor had used to bring us back from Pompeii; he had been perfecting it ever since. “He won’t be back until tomorrow,” Helen added.
“Can’t he just use the new and improved Slingshot to get back?” Nate suggested half-jokingly.
“I guess it’s not quite ready for that sort of thing.”
After helping Helen tie the balloons to a kitchen chair (there were ten of them, with a variety of messages, from Congratulations! to Good Luck!), I returned my attention to the wine bottle and opened it with a sharp twist of the corkscrew. I poured the wine halfway up a large pitcher, then went to the sink to
top it off with cold tap water, a procedure that probably would have puzzled anyone who hadn’t gone to Pompeii with us. If serving watered-down wine to a thirteen-year-old girl was odd, well, so were many things at our house.
“How are the coals looking out there?” Nate asked as I poured the rosy mixture into two glasses, passing one to Helen and leaving the other on the counter for him.
“They always look the same to me, pink-gray. I don’t know how you decide when they’re ready.”
“Years of grilling experience, Julia.”
As Helen held the deck door open for me, I noticed a twinkle in her eye and mouthed Stop it at her. I set the pitcher down next to the lemonade already sitting on ice on the deck. Lukewarm had been the Roman way of serving the watered-down wine, but I didn’t think Sabina would mind on such a hot afternoon. She and Abigail were on the sunny part of the lawn, tossing the Frisbee around, Wanda nipping at their feet as she ran back and forth following the path of the Frisbee. Kamal was slumped in a lawn chair with a glass of lemonade in his hand and Celer in his lap. “I’m exhausted. It’s a lot of work putting together a thesis defense. Celer, get off. You’ve gained too much weight.”
It was true. The dog hadn’t been exactly lean and energetic when he’d arrived in the twenty-first century in Kamal’s arms, and he’d only gotten chubbier since. Used to eating scraps in the Pompeii shop run by Sabina’s father, he had turned his nose up at the notion of pre-bagged dog food and simply shared ours—a lot of it.
Luckily, Sabina hadn’t followed suit. Though she was no doubt eating more food than she had grown up on, her habit of moving around most of the day countered the extra calories. She helped with chores, tended to the yard, and spent afternoons exploring the campus; with her height, she could have easily been mistaken for a college freshman instead of a high school student. Hers was a familiar face at the TTE lab, where she often hung out by Dr. Mooney’s workbench watching him tinker with STEWie parts.
Right now, her jeans and T-shirt made her look like a typical American teenager as she sent the Frisbee flying above Wanda’s head. She wasn’t. Having worked at both a laundry business and her father’s garum shop, she was used to hard physical labor. Just a few days earlier, I had caught her stockpiling empty shoe boxes and pop bottles. Sabina had explained that she thought that they might come in handy for something or other. Why give them to the truck that came down the street every week and drove away with the neighborhood’s discarded possessions? I felt a rising tide of anger toward Quinn. How dare he let himself in to snoop around, interfering with the fragile peace Sabina had made with her situation?
“Does Chief Kirkland need any help in there?” Kamal asked as his stomach gave a low growl. He nudged Celer off his lap and the dog gave the senior graduate student a look of profound hurt before settling down in the shade against the deck railing.
I set aside my concerns about Quinn and said, “He seems to have things under control. Here, have some corn chips.”
Kamal hailed from the more well-known Alexandria, and his Mediterranean coloring was similar to dark-eyed, dark-haired Sabina’s. His hair was on the long side at the moment and stubble covered the bottom half of his face. No need to shave for STEWie runs to the Neander Valley of so long ago that the notations in STEWie’s roster were not in AD or BC. He’d been spending time in 30 ka, as in thirty kilo-annum, as in thirty thousand years ago. I imagined that his thesis defense next week would find Kamal with his chin baby smooth, his black hair trimmed to a fine degree, and his somewhat stocky frame clad in a suit. The T-shirt he was currently wearing announced √-1 2³ ∑ π…and it was delicious, which had puzzled me until I’d heard him explain to Sabina that the symbols on the shirt, which spelled out i 8 sum Pi, had a second meaning. Sabina was an avid reader of math textbooks, and knew all about pie and π.
Letting Wanda have her way with the Frisbee, Abigail and Sabina returned to the deck. Abigail’s short green hair stood up perfectly still in the light breeze, as if the styling mousse had imparted a statue-like quality to her head. She poured the diluted wine into glasses for herself and Sabina—Kamal didn’t drink alcohol. Slumping into a chair, she took a long sip.
“Ahh, I needed that,” she said. “Wait, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean the wine—although I’m not complaining about that part—it was hot trying to keep up with Wanda.” She downed some more of the watery wine and turned to Kamal with a snicker, though not a mean one. She was very fond of him in a platonic, sisterly fashion. “There’s the man of the hour.”
“What’s this?” I asked.
Kamal puffed out his chest. “The run to Neander Valley I just got back from was quite fruitful, so to speak.”
“It’s big news all over campus. He got footage, didn’t you hear, Julia?” Abigail snickered again. “Of an early human and a Neanderthal making out—”
“Just thirty seconds worth,” Kamal interjected. “From a distance.”
“—and maybe even interbreeding. Though we’d probably have to wait nine months to find that out. Which way?” she asked as Kamal took another serene sip of his lemonade.
“Which way what?”
“Cro-Magnon woman or man?”
“Oh. Cro-Magnon man, Neanderthal woman, though we saw other examples. It was a ten-day run. Which is why I’m hungry.” He reached for more chips.
Kamal’s ten-day run would have passed in just about as many hours in the lab.
“Was it a lovers’ tryst in a cave or something?” Abigail asked in a somewhat dreamy voice. Sabina interrupted before Kamal could answer. “What is Ne-ander and this mate-ing?”
Abigail gave her a somewhat muddled explanation of the matter, drawing on her knowledge of academic Latin enriched by colloquialisms Sabina had taught her. Both of them ended up in a paroxysm of giggles.
After their laughter subsided, I asked, “Kamal, you’re not thinking of showing any…uh, inappropriate footage at your defense, are you?”
Kamal shook his head over the lemonade. “Don’t worry, Julia. It will all be very tasteful. The slides will be the whipped cream on the pie of my defense.”
“I’ll bet,” said Abigail.
I wasn’t so sure my definition of tasteful coincided with Kamal’s, so I decided that I’d better drop by his office on Monday morning to do a quick check before his defense that afternoon. Besides the three professors who would form the chairing committee, there would be students and other guests present, especially if the rumors about Kamal’s latest results got around, which I strongly suspected they would. Nothing stayed secret for long on St. Sunniva’s campus. In fact, I was surprised the news had taken this long to reach me—I must have been distracted by the whole thing with Quinn.
“I wish I could come to your defense,” Abigail said regretfully, “but I have a run with Dr. B on Monday. For some more data on Antoine and Marie-Anne.”
I felt a small and completely unexpected stab of envy at how casually they talked about time traveling. Dr. Holm and Quinn were both desperate to use STEWie—and, truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded having a second chance myself, perhaps to see the Beatles perform in concert after all, like we had originally planned before being sidelined to Pompeii. As for Dr. B, she was Dr. Baumgartner, a junior TTE professor and Abigail’s advisor. Antoine and Marie-Anne were Monsieur and Madame Lavoisier, an eighteenth-century chemist and his assistant wife, the latter of whom was the topic of Abigail’s thesis.
“Jacob Jacobson, will he be at defense?” Sabina asked. She had a bit of a crush on the ginger-haired, social media–addicted second-year grad student who shared an office with Abigail and Kamal.
“I suppose so,” Kamal said in the tone of one who couldn’t care less.
Nate came out carrying the food, with Helen on his heels. She quickly closed the screen door behind her at our call of Boxelder bugs! Helen greeted everybody and Nate, after stirring the charcoal, began
arranging the burgers on the grill.
Just as I had, Abigail eyed them with suspicion. “What are we having?”
“Salmon burgers, Miss Tanner,” Helen said, taking a seat in one of the deck chairs.
“You’ll like them,” Kamal said.
“Fish, yes?” Sabina said as Nate made room for her to help at the grill.
“Give them a try,” I said as Abigail pulled a face. “I have some hotdogs in the fridge if the burgers don’t work out.”
The first time the mention of hotdogs had come up, we had hurried to reassure Sabina that they didn’t contain dog meat, of course, but somewhat disconcertingly, she hadn’t seemed particularly bothered by the idea.
After he and Sabina had set the cover back on the grill, Nate turned to ask Abigail and Kamal how their research was coming along, which brought up the topic of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon social relations again. Helen, as befitted one well-versed in history, was most interested and asked Mr. Ahmad, as she called Kamal, for a full account. Nate seemed to be paying close attention, too.
My cell phone, which I had set down on the table with the drinks, rang, interrupting Kamal, who was providing details about the Neanderthal family structure. “Sorry, I thought I turned it off,” I said and glanced at the caller ID. Quinn. Great. I swatted away a boxelder bug, said, “I better take this,” and went back into the house to take the call.
“Still at the office, Jules?”
“No, I left a bit early today,” I started to say, then realized I didn’t owe him an explanation. There was no reason for me to be defensive about my long work hours anymore. “What do you want, Quinn? The answer is still no. I can’t get you on a STEWie run.”
“Guess what, Jules—I signed the divorce papers. I’ll put them in the mail tomorrow.”
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 4
