The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  That was how things went before STEWie.

  I leafed through a few more pages. A half-hearted effort had been made to excavate the spot and to look for the skeletons of the ten dead men, but neither they nor any additional artifacts had been found. Two witnesses, both acquaintances of the family, cancelled each other out, with one person swearing that he’d helped Olof carve the runes and the other that he had seen the stone unearthed with his own eyes. From that point onward, the opinions varied, with professional linguists and historians firmly on the no side and amateur enthusiasts and the occasional geologist leaning toward yes.

  I didn’t like assuming anyone was a liar or that Dr. Payne was right, but the most likely scenario was that Olof Ohman had carved the stone in his barn soon after settling on his new farm, then buried it under the tree only to “discover” it several years later, giving the roots plenty of time to curl down over the runestone. It didn’t embroil the two Ohman sons or Magnus in the hoax…unless the boys had been in on the whole thing, eager to participate in the prank, a rare bit of fun in the hard-scrabble immigrant life.

  I left the library thinking that the matter should have a simple answer. Either the stone was real, or it wasn’t. Though I highly doubted he had bothered to do much research, I was beginning to see why Quinn had thought a STEWie run might be just the thing.

  7

  The following morning, I awoke to the chirping of birds and the thought that I only had a day left. It was high time for me to see the runestone in person. Not on a STEWie run, but in the museum over in Alexandria.

  The thing was, I wanted someone else’s opinion on whether the whole thing was a hoax…and who better than an expert in crime?

  I called up Nate to see if he felt like taking a Sunday drive. It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized what I had done. One, he must have thought I had just invited him on an unofficial date. Two, had I? I could just as easily have called our retired chief of security, Dan Anderson, and asked him to come. Dan didn’t get out much these days and would have probably enjoyed the company. Three, this was hardly the time to be thinking about romance, with my almost-ex husband back in town with blackmail on his mind…so did that mean I should dress down in a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants to prevent any misunderstandings about the nature of my invitation? Or four, did it mean I should dress up, because that would make Nate less suspicious that something else was going on?

  I rather thought Nate wouldn’t notice either way and decided to stay with my jeans and button-down shirt.

  He showed up an hour later in slacks and a windbreaker, his hair wet and freshly combed. Wanda burst out of the Jeep and ran inside to greet Celer, who submitted to the other dog’s sniffing without bothering to get up. Nate suggested we take his Jeep and not my aged Honda, and we left, leaving Abigail and Sabina to decide whether they wanted to take the dogs on a walk to the nearby apple orchard or drive them. It was certainly a nice day for it—the apple-picking season was in full swing, and Friday’s humid rain had been replaced by sunshine and a crispness in the air that hinted that winter was not far off. I promised the girls that we’d try making an apple pie in the afternoon.

  Nate drove the half hour to Alexandria on Highway 94 through gently hilly farmland while I looked out the window, watching the scattered farmhouses with their red barns and dome-topped corn silos, the pointy Lutheran church spires peeking above treetops, and the small lakes surrounded by tall grasses, wondering what the area had been like when Olof Ohman had arrived from Scandinavia in search of a better life. Here and there cows and buffalo grazed placidly, not bothering to look up at the highway traffic zipping by. Fields laden with yellow corn rippled gently in the wind. The billboards disfiguring the scenery on both sides of the highway would not have been there in Olof Ohman’s time, of course, nor would the road itself, for that matter. A wagon and horses would have been used for transport. And in the fourteenth century, the date given on the runestone, travelers would have relied on the waterways.

  The runestone matter had grown more urgent. Quinn hadn’t been bluffing about having evidence. Abigail had noticed that a photo was missing from Sabina’s room. It was one we had taken of the girl sweeping the street in front of her father’s shop on the morning of our last day there. Celer was also in it, lounging in a shaft of summer sunshine. As I had pointed out to Abigail, we had no way of explaining their presence in a photo of a bustling Pompeian street, complete with a single-domed, pre-eruption Vesuvius in the background.

  “Sure there is. Creative editing,” Abigail had suggested. “Photoshop.”

  “Yes, but I doubt that the fake background we’ve given her as an Italian immigrant would stand up to more than a casual inquiry if Quinn posts the photo online. Not to mention that Sabina doesn’t speak Italian like we claimed but a very early version of it.” I added with perhaps more optimism than the situation warranted, “I’m hoping that Quinn will return the photo with the signed divorce papers.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Abigail had said.

  She and I had agreed that it was best not to say anything to Sabina, not until it was absolutely necessary. Luckily she hadn’t noticed the missing photo yet.

  As for Nate—I knew that if I told him what was going on, he’d turn the car around to find Quinn and arrest him for blackmail and theft, letting the chips fall as they may. Instead, I went with a half-truth. I wasn’t proud of it, but I had to put Sabina’s welfare first. All I wanted was for this to go away quietly.

  So when Nate asked me why I was interested in the runestone, I told him I was just brushing up on local history, in case any related STEWie requests popped up. If he assumed that it was just a pretext for spending the day with him, well, so be it.

  Nate nodded at my answer and, speeding up to pass a U-Haul truck, asked, “What are runes, anyway? Foreign languages are not exactly my strong point.”

  He had mentioned that before. As a child of grandparents who had come from four different backgrounds, he’d had plenty of opportunity to pick up languages other than English, but apparently none of them had stuck.

  I had garnered a bit of information from reading the books on the runestone. “It’s the early alphabet of the Germanic languages—what Old English was first written down in. The Scandinavian version is the futhark, named for the first six letters, F, U, TH, A, R, and K. Runes were developed for writing on wood, so they have few curves. They look a little like stick figures,” I said, thinking of the poster Dr. Holm had shown me in the Coffey Library. I rattled off a few more facts and added, “By the way, thanks for coming out with me.”

  “Happy to do it. So is this thing real, this stone?”

  “That’s what I need your opinion on.”

  “I’m not a historian.”

  “I’ve already got an opinion from a historian. Dr. Payne—his specialty is American history—said that the stone is a hoax, and a poorly executed one at that. Dr. Holm, whose specialty is runic linguistics, sounds like she thinks there might be something to it and would be happy to tackle the problem with a STEWie run or two, if only she could secure a green light from Dr. Payne and funding. I’m guessing you’ve come across hoaxers before?” I asked before remembering what had made him leave the BWCAW. A photographer he had been smitten with had been setting wildfires throughout the Boundary Waters wilderness. Why she had done it never became clear, but before Nate and everyone else had caught on, one of the fires got out of hand, killing a park ranger. The pyromaniac was now in prison. Wanda had been her dog. But I wasn’t sure that counted as a hoax exactly.

  Apparently neither did he, because all he said was, “Only of the identity theft kind. It doesn’t apply in this case.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think the runestone was carved for financial gain. The good farmer got all of ten dollars for his find from the Minnesota Historical Society after the stone changed hands.” As an aside, I added, “If it had been me,
I think I would have charged people who wanted to see where the stone was dug up. Nothing wrong with making a bit of extra spending money.”

  “It makes him seem like an honest man, this farmer of yours.”

  “I guess.”

  Nate had once told me that in his experience most crimes came down to one of five motives: greed, desire, fear, jealousy, or desperation. We discussed them each in turn and ruled out fear and desperation as motives for Olof Ohman, and also, per our discussion, greed. That left the Scandinavian immigrant community’s jealousy of the Italian immigrant community over the whole Columbus issue…or, a shade more nobly, Olof’s desire to see his Viking ancestors get their dues.

  Nate gave a small shrug. “If it was a hoax, then your farmer—”

  “Olof Ohman.”

  “—Olof Ohman may have done it just to get his name into newspapers. Generally speaking, to run a successful scam—whatever the motive, money or fame—you have to give people what they want, something big for their eyes to feast on. Like a letter saying you’ve won a million dollars and they’d be happy to send you the money after you pay the small transfer fee of $250. If you were already enthusiastic about the idea of Vikings in Minnesota—and I’m not talking about the football team—then I suppose farmer Olof Ohman’s ‘find’ would have been just the thing.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. The runestone would be the missing link between the Vikings of old and the Scandinavian-Americans who live in the Kensington area. It’s what people want.”

  He brought up another possibility as he slowed down to turn onto the exit for Alexandria. “Could it have been a joke that got out of hand?”

  “You mean Olof Ohman might have made it up because he wanted something to do during the long Minnesota winters? Could be. It’s just that he looks dead serious in all of his photos. But then they all did.”

  “It can’t have been an easy life, not for an immigrant farmer trying to eke out a living. Then again, I would think his family and neighbors would have noticed if he had lugged a stone into his barn and started spending a lot of time in there.”

  “Why would they?” I said a bit more snappily than I intended.

  He glanced over at me. “I just meant that it was a tight-knit community. Nowadays people spend years living across the street from someone without ever meeting them. It wasn’t like that back then.”

  He was right, of course. Even the neighbor I knew best, Martha, probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d taken to carving stones in the privacy of my garage. But that was how it went today—we didn’t rely on our neighbors for help with daily problems or even a cup of something hot in the evening. Our support networks were geographically broader—my parents lived in Florida, my cousins were in Austin, and my best friend from college had moved to Seattle.

  Nate slowed down to a stop at a red light. “Hey, how come you haven’t seen this stone before? Didn’t you grow up in this area?”

  “I was sick the day of the school trip. My parents wrote about this kind of stuff, but they never thought to take me along. They ran the local newspaper—not the campus one, the Thornberg one—back in the days when everyone read it and you could make a decent living selling ad space.” Quinn had always meant to take me to see his grandfather’s stone, but we had never gotten around to it. And by the end of our relationship, I was tired of hearing about it.

  Since Nate had asked me a personal question, I decided it would only be fair play if I asked one in return. “What about you, how did you end up with such a motley collection of grandparents?”

  He flashed a grin at me. “You mean, one-fourth Dakota, one-fourth Scottish, one-fourth Sri Lankan, and one-fourth Quebecois? Simple. My grandmother Mary met my grandfather Duncan at a picnic—that’s the Dakota and Scottish connection. Two months later they married and in due course had seven children, one of them being my father, Nate Senior. On the other side, my grandmother Renée met my grandfather Nimal at school, thereby cementing the Quebecois and Sri Lankan side of the family. They had one child, a daughter named Gigi. Gigi and Nate Senior met in college, and I’m the result.”

  “That’s quite a family story. Mine’s pretty simple.”

  “Everyone is of Norwegian ancestry?”

  “Pretty much. Lots of blue eyes and blonde hair in the family, except for me. I’m the black sheep—or rather, the brown one,” I added, giving myself a mental kick for comparing my hair and eye color to a sheep’s.

  “And Quinn?” he said as the light changed and he sped up.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “Every other person in Thornberg seems to be from Scandinavia. Is his family from Norway as well?”

  “Oh, that. No, they’re Danish. They never quite warmed up to me, since I was from a Norwegian family and all.”

  “People are funny sometimes, aren’t they?”

  “I’d say as a rule they are, yes.”

  “Julia?”

  “Yes?”

  His attention was focused on the road. “I seem to remember promising to make shrimp curry for you again one of these days.”

  The first time the shrimp curry had come up had been at a garum shop, as we waited for Professor Mooney to swap some goods with Sabina’s father for a tunic for Nate and a dress for me. The shrimp curry, which Nate had made at a celebratory picnic after we got home, had indeed been delicious, as promised.

  “So how about next Friday, at my place?” he went on.

  Maybe I should have worn a ratty T-shirt after all. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this, for dinner with Nate. After all, dinners led to other things. I rolled down the window a bit. The inside of the car suddenly seemed too hot.

  “Julia?”

  “Friday night it is,” I said. I hoped the whole thing with Quinn would be over by then. I wanted him to stay firmly in my past. And once he was gone for good, maybe things with Nate would be clearer. It was quite possible that I was reading too much into it anyway, and he was just being polite. Perhaps all of Helen’s goading had gone to my brain.

  Restaurants and shops lined Alexandria’s wide main street, Broadway; a lot of them incorporated the word Viking into their name or had some sort of Scandinavian motif. The Runestone Museum was at the north end of the street. We parked, grabbed a quick bite of lunch at a diner, then walked down past the museum for a closer look at Big Ole, a thirty-foot-tall Viking statue. Big Ole sported a red cape, a winged helmet, and, in one muscular fist, a spear. His shield proudly proclaimed:

  ALEXANDRIA

  BIRTHPLACE OF

  AMERICA

  “How do they figure?” Nate asked, looking up at Big Ole.

  “The runestone. If it’s real, it’s the earliest record of Europeans stepping foot on future US soil.”

  “But still…it wasn’t really the start of anything, America or otherwise. And there were already people living here. My people—a quarter of them, at least.”

  “It’s good for tourism.”

  “Besides, wasn’t the runestone found near Kensington?”

  “Alexandria is the county seat.”

  “Vikings, all the way here.” He shook his head.

  “Actually, according to Dr. Holm, they wouldn’t have been Vikings by that time. Christianized Norse, she said.”

  We waited to let a car pass, then crossed the street to the museum. Before going in, we stopped to look through the fence into the area behind the main building. There was a barn, a smokehouse for curing meat, a washhouse, and several other pioneer-era structures, whether replicas or original I wasn’t sure. We headed inside and stopped to pay the admission fee in the gift shop. The gift shop, which turned out to be a precursor of the museum itself, seemed to have a bit of everything—Big Ole bobbleheads shared shelf space with teepee Christmas ornaments. There were plastic Viking helmets, as well as runestone T-shirts, runestone mugs, and runestone license
plate frames. As we waited for a customer to finish paying at the cash register, I rifled through the T-shirt rack to find one for Sabina and turned to see that Nate had donned one of the plastic helmets. It was gold, with horns like elephant tusks sticking out on either side, like he had a big U on his head. It looked ridiculous on him.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “They didn’t really wear them, you know,” I said, suppressing laughter. “Dr. Holm told me that.”

  “Really? I’m crushed. I think I’ll buy it as a souvenir anyway.”

  “Should we tell them?” I nodded toward the cash register, where a museum staffer was ringing up a purchase.

  “I expect they’ll find out soon enough.”

  We bought the helmet along with the T-shirt for Sabina and headed into the main display area. The small museum was nearly empty, and most of the guests were families with small children in tow.

  Propped up on a stand inside a protective glass case, the runestone held the spot of honor. Around it, wall panels explained the meaning of the runes and the history of the stone. Off to the side were more display rooms with exhibits on pioneer and Native American life.

  My first impression was that the runestone seemed small, smaller than I had expected from the poster in the Coffey Library and the picture of Quinn’s grandfather with it. About the size and shape of a tombstone, it was dark gray, except for the lower left corner, where there was a triangle of lighter gray. A nearby panel noted that the stone weighed just over two hundred pounds.