The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  Helen helped me sweep the crumbs off the table and into a napkin. “Speaking of Chief Kirkland…”

  “Were we?”

  “Why didn’t he join us for dinner? I would have liked to hear his impressions of the events on Olof Ohman’s farm.”

  Why hadn’t Nate joined us for dinner? For one thing, I hadn’t invited him. For another, I’d gotten a vibe. Nate seemed to be annoyed that I wasn’t more angry at Quinn. Which wasn’t exactly right—I was furious with Quinn. But I still wasn’t convinced that he had kidnapped Dr. Holm. I wondered if the shrimp curry dinner on Friday night was still on. To my surprise, I suddenly realized that I had rather been looking forward to it.

  I didn’t want to explain all that to Helen, so instead I let a yawn escape and said, “He had to get home to feed and walk Wanda.”

  “I should let you get to bed,” Helen said, rising to her feet. “You’ve had a long day.”

  “Helen, want to come along with us to 1362?” I asked as I walked her to the door.

  “I don’t know that my presence would help much. My work is with language, letters, manuscripts—and yes, the runestone is a document and falls into that category. But I’m neither an expert in runic linguistics nor in the pre-Columbian history of the Americas. Ironically, the person you need is Dr. Holm herself. I wonder what she thought of seeing the stone come to light.”

  I had wondered that too.

  14

  Ten men, red from blood and dead.

  “You do realize what that sounds like?” Nate said as I repeated the ominous snippet of text from the runestone.

  Of course I realized. That was why I had brought it up.

  “It sounds like a ghost zone,” Dr. Baumgartner said, hurrying into the meeting Dean Braga had called in her office. Dr. B slid her tall frame into a chair, a coffee cup in one hand. “Sorry I’m late, I overslept. What did I miss?” Like the rest of us who had gone on yesterday’s run, she looked jet-lagged—our more than seven-hour stay in the past had felt like the equivalent of a plane hop west, time zone change and all.

  “Dr. Payne thinks that it’s a waste of time for us to look for them at all, that it would take too many runs and tie up the lab indefinitely. The rest of us disagree,” Nate summarized for her.

  Dean Braga gave a harried sigh. “Not to seem heartless, but the department’s emergency funds only go so far. It does sound like a lot of extra runs with no guarantee of success.”

  “Quite correct, Dean Braga. Other researchers,” Dr. Payne said, meaning himself, “need access to STEWie. We all have work that needs to get done, not to mention article deadlines. The Norsemen never came, so this is all a waste of everyone’s time.” Dr. Payne, if anything, had dug his heels in even more now that he’d had a chance to process everything. I assumed that the only reason he had bothered to come to the meeting at all was to argue for the lab to be opened up again.

  “If the Norsemen never came, yes, that would be a problem.” Dr. B said. She took a long sip of the coffee. “Because the point in time where we’ll most likely find Quinn and Dr. Holm is when the stone carvers were there.”

  “And if they never were?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  “Then we’ll be jumping around in time endlessly looking for our missing pair while they jump around in time endlessly looking for the Norsemen.”

  It was becoming clear that going into the fourteenth century would be no simple matter. I shifted where I was, standing with my back against the wall of Dean Braga’s office. There was the question of when and where—Dr. B’s binary search method had yielded excellent results in 1898, but was not as straightforward if a moving target was involved. There was a good chance we would be bouncing around the fourteenth century like unsuccessful billiard balls, draining the TTE lab resources and Dean Braga’s patience.

  Dr. B added, “That’s not the only problem, Chief Kirkland. If both parties—our team and the missing pair—do manage to converge on the Norsemen’s visit—if they came,” she added for Dr. Payne’s benefit, “—we will face the same problem we encountered in 1898. We’d have to stay hidden. We wouldn’t be able to confront Quinn and rescue Dr. Holm in the presence of the Norsemen.”

  The whole thing was rather circular. We were most likely to find Quinn and Dr. Holm in the vicinity of the Norsemen, but that was exactly where we wouldn’t be able to take action. And that was assuming that the Norsemen had come at all, as Dr. Payne kept reminding us.

  Nate crossed his arms over his chest and sat back in his chair. “Quinn has burned his bridges. The only way this comes out all right is if he comes back a hero, the great explorer, the first person to find conclusive evidence of Norse presence in the US. He is not simply going to sit on a hilltop and wait. I know you still believe that the runestone’s a hoax, Dr. Payne, but I doubt that’s Quinn’s opinion.”

  “I agree,” I said, and they all turned in their seats to look at me, like they had forgotten I was present. Well, I wasn’t just going to sit in my office while this mess was going on. “Quinn—and Dr. Holm—well, you don’t go to all that trouble without being convinced that what you’re seeking is real. Which means he needs the whole deal—the Norse ships, the men, and whatever deadly event they encountered…their ghost zone.”

  “It’s not technically a ghost zone,” Dr. B said, “since the Norsemen belong to that time period and aren’t time travelers.”

  “It might as well be if it killed ten of them at once,” I said.

  Dean Braga brought up the most economical option and the one guaranteed to satisfy the university researchers who had been deluging her office asking when STEWie runs would resume. “Again, I don’t want to sound heartless, but we could just wait for them to come back and let the lab get back to its normal schedule in the meantime. After all, they can’t do any harm to History. Let them search for the carver or carvers of the stone.”

  A law enforcement officer’s frown furrowed Nate’s eyebrows. “What if Dr. Holm is in danger from Quinn?”

  “Or their battery power runs out?” Dr. B said. “Dr. Holm has sat in on a couple of time-travel workshops, but she’s green when it comes to practical issues that pop up on runs. What if they can’t come back?”

  “Like I said, I think Nate is right,” I said into the sudden silence. “Quinn wants to return with footage to seed a reality show, so it’ll have to include more than just a lone chiseler on a hilltop. That, I think we can all agree, is an activity that’s pretty low on the action scale as far as TV audiences go.”

  How much better (for TV ratings) to score footage of a Norse vessel gliding into the New World, its woolen sails taut in the wind, its prow proudly pointing landward. I imagined Quinn and Dr. Holm shooting close-ups of the ship’s crew from shore, capturing for eternity the wind-chiseled, bearded faces of the Gotlanders and Norwegians. It occurred to me that unless there was some form of hierarchy present, a Gotlander must have carved the stone. They were listed first on the runestone, after all.

  “I imagine,” I continued, “they’ll want footage of the Norsemen’s ships sailing into the cold waters of Lake Superior—”

  “Or Hudson Bay, to the north,” Dr. Payne interjected. “The probability of one is as high as the probability of the other, that is, almost zero.”

  “And of the explorers on their journey farther inland—”

  “They wouldn’t have passed unnoticed. It wasn’t a wilderness they were heading into. There were people living there,” Dr. Payne said.

  “I know,” Nate said. I thought I detected a new note of irritation in his voice, one that had nothing to do with me this time. “I’m related to them.”

  “Oh, are you, Chief Kirkland?”

  “One of my grandmothers is Dakota.”

  “Well, there you have it. They would have run into some of your ancestors. Here’s something to wrap your mind around—like Columbus, t
hey would have thought they were in Asia,” he said, echoing what Dr. Holm had told me back in the Coffey Library.

  His words made me wonder how much of our modern worldview was completely and utterly wrong. Like all past cultures, we held certain beliefs based on nothing but assumption. How soon before someone new came along, like Copernicus and Einstein had in the past, to adjust our worldview?

  “Perhaps the Dakota watched from the shore as the Norse vessels sailed in, wondering what to make of the strange arrival,” I said.

  Dr. Payne shook his head at once. “The Norse kept up a presence on the coast of Canada from the turn of the millennium onward. They wouldn’t have been unexpected visitors. Word of their ships would probably have spread west. There was a trade network in place.” He went on, “Look, I know you all think that I’m a crotchety old man, and it’s true. But that’s not the issue here. I represent the Department of American History,” he said rather grandiosely. “When I tell acquaintances that, they always assume that my research interests start with the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. Not so. The group I lead, well, we’ve been sharpening our time travel skills on events in near time, such as the Battle of Antietam, before venturing deeper into the Americas’ past. Without fail, my grad students and postdocs always have silly ideas they think will make them famous. Your estranged husband would fit right in with my students, Julia.” He gave a small, back-of-the-throat laugh. “We’re almost at the point where we are ready to tackle far time. Far time! I don’t want to waste roster spots looking for needles in the haystack of History. Just think of all the wonderful things that you could document for posterity—and we plan to do it! The Incas building their suspension bridges across deep mountain gorges and constructing a stone road system that rivaled that of Rome; the Chinchorro creating History’s first mummies; Cahokia, the biggest population center to the north of the Rio Grande before the floods and the earthquake—”

  “Professor,” Nate interrupted him, “I agree with you. But that’s not the issue facing us.”

  “Humor me for just a moment longer, Chief Kirkland. Do any of you know who the closest genetic relatives to Native Americans are?”

  Clearly impatient to return to the problem at hand, Nate surprised me by answering, “Siberians.”

  “That’s right, indigenous Siberians. How wonderful it would be to find out when their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait. Did they continue inland and south on foot, or did they build boats and follow the Pacific coastline? I don’t know which one it was. No one does. My money is on the boat route. What do you think, Chief Kirkland?”

  “I—well, I would probably say boats, too.”

  “You and I both know that finding out the answer wouldn’t make for great television or an easily financed STEWie run, don’t we? The real mysteries in the world’s past usually do not. Here’s another one—maize was domesticated in Mesoamerica from the wild grass teosinte, but when and how? I’d probably generate more interest in the media if I put about a rumor that I suspected that aliens had brought the first corn kernels to Earth.” The professor gathered his things and got to his feet. “Bear all that in mind as you decide what we should do, Dean Braga. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have essay topics to come up with…”

  After the professor had left, mumbling to himself about the book he was planning to write (“A monumental work—The Rise and Fall of the Mayan Empire—why did they abandon their cities? We must find out, and make another attempt to rescue more of their codices…And in the sequel, I could decipher the Inka khipu…”), Dean Braga turned to the rest of us and said reluctantly, “One run. That’s all I can give you. Dr. Mooney is still a couple of days from finishing up the new Slingshot so plan your run for Friday. I don’t like the forced wait any more than you do, Chief, but I think it’s the prudent thing to do.”

  We needed Dr. Mooney’s Slingshot to correct our position once we were in the fourteenth century and as backup in case we got stuck there because of the double basket problem. Going to a mapped nineteenth-century farm was one thing, but blindly traipsing around in the fourteenth century was a different kettle of fish.

  “And if we’re lucky,” she added, “that will give Dr. Holm and Mr. Olsen enough time to return of their own accord.”

  Nate caught my arm as we left Dean Braga’s office together. “Can you meet me in my office later? I know a history expert I’d like to consult before we head into this supposed ghost zone. Her name is Mary Kirkland. She’s my grandmother.”

  “There you are,” Nate said as I walked into his office just before noon, having run a couple of errands first. “Do you want some coffee before we go? I’m still a bit groggy from last night.”

  “Sure.”

  He headed into the large front room of the campus security office and returned with two Styrofoam cups. He handed me one. “Sorry, it’s really not that good. Cream? Sugar? Neither will help.”

  I hadn’t been in the security office in the main campus administration building since Dan Anderson, our previous security chief, had retired. A hallway led from the small parking lot at the back of the building, where three or four security cars waited, past Officer Van Underberg, who was typing up an incident report, and another officer I knew only slightly, ending at Nate’s desk.

  I stirred a small cup of powdered creamer into the coffee. As always, I had a box of cookies in my shoulder bag for dealing with any emergencies that arose in my capacity as dean’s assistant. It was no secret that Nate was more of a fan of freshly made food, with no preservatives, additives, or corn syrup, but I offered him the macadamia chocolate chip cookies anyway. He took one.

  I took two. I was stressed by how long we had to wait before going after Quinn, not to mention an embarrassing conversation I’d had before coming to Nate’s office. And I felt guilty and awkward about having kept Quinn’s blackmail attempt from Nate. In hindsight, I realized that I should have confided in him. The fact that he hadn’t said, You could have trusted me, Julia, rather proved that I could have.

  After a moment of uncomfortable silence during which he seemed disinclined to speak, I asked between cookie bites, “Why aren’t they back yet? It’s been weeks. For them, I mean.”

  Quinn and Dr. Holm had taken off at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. The pair had been gone twenty hours, which, assuming they had stayed in the past that whole time, meant that three weeks had passed for them. Three weeks. What had they been doing all that time? And what were they doing for food, I wondered as I munched on another of the cookies. Hunting, fishing, eating granola bars? Quinn hated granola bars.

  There were too many questions and not enough answers.

  “We’re not giving up on finding them. We just have to be smart about it.” Nate shifted in his chair, causing it to creak. It looked a little small for his lanky frame. “As for why they aren’t back yet, I can think of several reasons.”

  He dipped the cookie I had given him into his coffee, looked at it with suspicion, and then put the whole thing in his mouth. “All right,” he said after a moment. “One, they could be camped out on Runestone Hill in 1362, waiting for the Norsemen to show up. Two, they got what they needed but overshot the present like we did coming back from Pompeii, and can’t do anything about it because they drained their Slingshot. They might show up out of thin air in a few weeks. Three, they’re finding the Slingshot difficult to control, and they’ve ended up someplace completely unexpected. Even Dr. Mooney admits that his Slingshot 2.0 still needs some work.” He rubbed his chin, which had stubble on it, as if he hadn’t bothered with a morning shave. It looked good that way. “Four, it hasn’t really been three weeks because they’re jumping back and forth between the past and the present to replenish their supplies. For all we know they could have had dinner last night and, uh, spent the night in Quinn’s hotel room, or in Dr. Holm’s apartment.” I thought I heard him gnash his teeth at the possibility that they’d been so close. “Th
at occurred to me this morning, and I drove out to check both places. No trace of them. The manager at Lena’s Lodge hasn’t seen Quinn since yesterday, but that’s about it. I’ve asked the town police to keep an eye out on both places.”

  “I never would have thought of checking the hotel.” I added, considering his words, “It sounds like you’re starting to give Quinn the benefit of the doubt. If they’re having dinner at Dr. Holm’s apartment, she can hardly have been forced into it.”

  “Like you say, it’s been three weeks. She may have very well succumbed to Stockholm syndrome and become invested in helping Quinn.”

  “Oh.”

  “There is one last possibility I can think of,” he added, shifting uncomfortably in the chair again.

  “Which is?”

  He offered me one of the cookies from the box I had set on the desk, taking another for himself. “If the Slingshot did send them into a ghost zone, they might be dead.”

  He said it carefully, as if the thought of Quinn’s death might disturb me. I almost said, You clearly haven’t spent much time around divorced people, but didn’t think he was in the mood for humor. Besides, I didn’t belong to that group yet—the signed divorce papers still hadn’t arrived. I was keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrow’s mail would bring them, or Thursday’s at the latest, unless Quinn had completely forgotten to mail them in the excitement of planning his jaunt into the past. I washed the cookies down with some of the weak coffee.

  Dr. Holm’s role in the whole thing still puzzled me. If she had gone willingly, there was no explanation for the disturbance in the lab or the text message she had sent me. If it hadn’t been for those two things, I would have pegged the most likely scenario as being (a) Quinn charms Dr. Holm, (b) Dr. Holm agrees to take him into the past, jeopardizing her career, which might have been stalled anyway, and (c) they steal their way into STEWie’s basket, with the goal of filming the carving of the runestone.