The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  “The Americas—”

  “Are two big continents whose history spans thousands of years. You need an expert whose interests are specific to that time period and area. Someone who is, shall we say…as obsessed with the runestone as your Mr. Olsen.”

  “I have contacted someone, as a matter of fact.”

  “Well, there you go. And I suppose what you bring to the table is your expertise on Quinn.”

  I decided not to take offense.

  He went on, “Who’s paying for all the runs we did to 1898 and this final one? And whose roster spot are you going to take?”

  “Chancellor Evans assured Dean Braga that the school will cover expenses, within reason. One of our postdocs is missing, after all.”

  He didn’t deem that worthy of comment.

  “Dr. Payne? Do you think we should get the Black Death vaccine before we go?”

  “You’re unlikely to catch anything from fourteenth-century Native Americans, and certainly not the bubonic plague.”

  The converse—us passing on a European disease—was impossible because of History’s constraints. Neither were what I was worried about. “There’s a theory that the Black Death carried on their own clothing or effects killed the ten Norsemen.”

  “Ah. That theory. Well, I would ask Dr. May about it, but I believe that the vaccine is a multi-dose one, administered during the course of a few weeks. I suppose you could get the first dose. In any case, antibiotics will come to the rescue if you come back covered in boils.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or if he was making fun of the Black Death theory. I got to my feet. “The fourteenth century—any advice, professor?”

  I meant in terms of bringing items like bug spray or night vision goggles, but he stabbed out the cigarette on the bench and said, “Bring me back photos. Of everything you see.”

  The phone rang on Wednesday afternoon while I was dealing with a stack of conference travel receipts. “Science Dean’s offices, Julia Olsen speaking, how can I help you?”

  A hearty female voice said, “You’re the person I’m looking for. That is, if you’re the one who sent a message to the authors of Runestone: Rock Solid?”

  I admitted as much.

  “That’d be me and Ron. Did you enjoy the book?”

  I admitted that I had, and she asked, “Did you want Ron and me to come in and sign some copies? We also do workshops where we teach the lost art of runic carving. It’s best for ages ten and up, what with the possibility of injury from the chisel—”

  “It’s nothing like that,” I interrupted her, deciding to return her forthrightness by being forthright myself. “Care to come along to the fourteenth century?”

  “I’m sorry, where did you say you worked?”

  “St. Sunniva University. I’m the assistant to the science dean. There’s an ongoing matter in the Time Travel Engineering department on which we could use your help and expertise.”

  She gave a throaty peal of delight. “The Time Machine is real? Ron will be pleased. We thought it was, but you never can tell with the media. All those photos of British coronations and footage of Elvis concerts, it was hard to tell if the whole thing was just a big hoax.”

  I cringed. The footage that made it into the news wasn’t exactly representative of what we were trying to accomplish with STEWie.

  “It’s real enough. If you do decide to come with us…well, I should let you know that there’s probably an element of danger involved.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Well, it is time travel. I wouldn’t expect it to be a walk in the park.”

  “It’s not just the time travel part of it—we have a situation on our hands. How soon can you be here? It would be more prudent to discuss the details in person.”

  “Would the morning suit you? That will give us time to finish up here and drive up.”

  Then she asked me a long list questions. All were insightful, and some raised important issues that I hadn’t thought of myself. I hung up the phone thinking that our amateur enthusiasts might turn out to be more helpful than I had anticipated.

  I watched as a white recreational vehicle twice the length of a car and with an overhang above the cab pulled into the campus parking lot. The RV body was plastered with informational ads regarding the Tuttles’ books and workshops. I had come out to meet them since first-time visitors tended to find the campus’s circular layout confusing. Two chunky, smiling figures descended the three steps of the RV into the crisp mid-September morning and greeted me. They had left before sunrise to take the two-hour drive north to St. Sunniva University.

  Ruth-Ann gave me a bear hug—she smelled of lavender shampoo and freshly baked pastries—and said, “Thanks for inviting us, hon. The campus looks lovely. Want a tour of our abode? C’mon in.”

  As we all filed back into the RV, she explained that she and her husband took turns driving and that the kitchen/living area expanded at the touch of a button. She proceeded to demonstrate. The RV was now their home, she said. “We sold the business and the house and bought the bus so that we could drive to sites and stay as long as we like.” They earned money from selling books, teaching workshops, and accepting donations from historically minded citizens, she said, adding that I had reached them at the Jeffers Petroglyphs site, where they had spent the past month researching a new book about pre-Contact Native American petroglyphs.

  “We like painted and carved rocks,” Ron said from behind me, the first sentence I’d heard him speak other than Hello. Ron’s light-brown beard was braided into three sections, giving him somewhat of a Viking look. It had colorful beads woven into it. He was wearing a lime-green T-shirt, worn jeans, and hiking boots.

  “Want an orange juice and something to eat, hon? I just pulled some muffins out of the oven.” Ruth-Ann lifted the foil off a plate. Blueberry. She reached for a napkin and placed a muffin on it for me. She, too, was wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a T-shirt. Hers was a pale pink.

  We ate the muffins standing, since the table seemed to serve as more of an office than an eating area; the reference books, petroglyph sketches, and photos that covered it had spread to the couch, the main seating option. A half-finished sketch of a turtle from the Jeffers site caught my eye. Ruth-Ann explained that Ron was the one with the artistic talent and that before turning their hand to amateur archeology they had run an interior decorating business—she had done the books, he the decorating—which explained the pleasing hues of the interior of the RV, reds and blues that complimented the steel frame of the vehicle.

  I returned Ruth-Ann and Ron’s hospitality by giving them a tour of STEWie’s lab. Dr. Mooney was there, at the workbench in one corner, painstakingly building his Slingshot 3.0 from scratch. “I’m close, Julia. Just waiting on some custom-made parts on a rush order. They promised delivery by the end of the day.” He wiped his hands on his apron and shook Ruth-Ann and Ron’s hands enthusiastically. “You’re going with Julia and the others tomorrow?”

  He set his tools aside to show the Tuttles around the lab. Ruth-Ann was very taken with all the photographs of people and places of the past that covered the walls. Ron, for his part, kept looking up at the largest mirror as if impressed by its size. Most visitors were.

  “Ah, that was the problematic one,” Dr. Mooney explained fondly. “We discovered a kink in its shape just after it was mounted in the lab. We had to take it down, fix it, and remount it.”

  “I’m not sure what we can pay you,” I said as we finished the circuit of the lab and returned to Dr. Mooney’s workbench. “I’ll have to check with Dean Braga to see if she’ll approve a consulting fee. Any photographs you take will be yours to do with as you wish, of course.”

  “Anything you can spare, hon. The bus could use an update to its plumbing system. Where are we going exactly?”

  I met the professor’s eyes over their head. “That’s somet
hing we’ll need your professional opinion on. Let me show you the footage.”

  Ron and Ruth-Ann pulled up chairs and I brought out my laptop. For the next few minutes Dr. Mooney and I had the pleasure of watching the wonder on their faces as they watched the video Dr. Payne had taken on Runestone Hill. It made me forget about Quinn for a moment, at least until we got to the end of the tape and I had to explain what had prompted our run into 1898.

  “It’s the fourteenth century that we need to focus on now, because that’s where they would have gone next. Sorry, let me just check this.” I had noticed that there was a voice message on my cell, which I had turned off during the tour. It was from Nate. He never called my cell unless it was urgent.

  While Dr. Mooney took the opportunity to explain to the Tuttles about the new Slingshot, I stepped aside and listened to the message. I returned the phone to my shoulder bag and turned to hear the professor say, “—and that approach seems to have succeeded in keeping the stability problem under control. Like I said, if the last of the parts arrive as promised, you’ll be able to take Slingshot 3.0 with you in case you need to adjust your position in spacetime. Now, Julia, you were saying that we need Ruth-Ann’s and Ron’s opinion on when and where to aim our fourteenth century jump…”

  I didn’t answer. I had a bigger problem on my hands. Sabina was missing. She had not shown up for her afternoon classes.

  17

  “Sabina, you can’t just decide to leave school in the middle of the day.”

  “So-ree.”

  “I’m just glad Officer Van Underberg found you. Don’t forget to apologize to Abigail when she gets here. And to Nate the next time you see him. We were all worried sick.”

  Abigail, who had been out looking for Sabina on her bike, wasn’t back yet. Nate and Officer Van Underberg had taken separate cars to increase their odds of finding her. The officer had finally spotted Sabina on Eagle Creek Road, walking in the direction of the highway, Celer trudging along behind her. All the good-natured officer could get out of her was that she had not gone back to class after lunch. Instead, she had marched out of the high school building and gone home to fetch Celer. The officer had dropped off the pair at the house before heading back to the campus security office.

  “Did someone say something at lunch?” I asked, pacing around the kitchen table. Sabina sat at one end of it looking like a stereotypical sullen teenager. Celer had lapped up some water and then headed into the living room to settle in behind the TV for what he no doubt considered a well-earned nap.

  “No thing.” She pronounced it as two words.

  “Did they bully you or call you a name?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not because of tomorrow’s dentist appointment, is it?”

  She didn’t even deem that worthy of a reply. I tried another tack. “Where were you headed?”

  “No where.”

  “You must have had some place in mind.”

  “To big road, then big water—At-lan-tic—then boat. Boat to home.”

  Her words came out haltingly and I felt a lump in my throat.

  When she had asked where Pompeii was in regards to St. Sunniva’s, we had drawn a map for her. She wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect of flying, so she had decided that she would one day cross the Atlantic by boat. Of course, there was no real home for Sabina to return to, not really.

  “Sabina, there you are!”

  Abigail had burst into the house. She rushed over to give Sabina a hug. “I’m glad you’re okay, I was so worried. Now, what happened? Tell you what—let’s make some hot chocolate and you can tell me all about it.”

  I left the kitchen to give them some space and sat down at the dining room table with my laptop—I had to get back to campus but didn’t want to leave until I was sure Sabina was all right. Thinking that Abigail might need to explain just how far the Atlantic Ocean was from Minnesota, and also about passports and things, I gave my attention to catching up on the day’s emails and tried to look as if I wasn’t listening to what was being said in the kitchen. Unfortunately for me, the two switched to Latin at once, probably because it was easier for Abigail to coax the story out of Sabina that way.

  My fingers, of their own accord, took me from my work inbox to a website stocked with Pompeii photos, where I had gone a few times just to look. I scrolled through them now with a different eye. If Sabina had managed to make it there, she would have found the stone streets and houses eerily empty, bereft of life and laughter, except for the tourist kind. Sabina’s father’s garum store was not in any of the photos. It lay in the still-unexcavated part of town, undisturbed.

  I thought at one point that I overheard my name being said in the kitchen, and also the word STEWie (which Sabina pronounced with a long vowel, STOO-eee, like she was calling a pig).

  As I continued to scroll through the Pompeii website, an idea popped into my mind. Who was to say that Sabina couldn’t go back for a visit when she was a bit older? Not on an ocean liner to the tourist Pompeii, but via STEWie into the proud merchant town of the past. She could never return to Pompeii of her childhood because she was already there in that time period—History wouldn’t allow it—but perhaps a few years before she was born, say 50 or 60 AD, just to take a look around for a bit?

  We had come a long way since STEWie’s mirrors had first inched into place to send Drs. Mooney and Rojas to 1903 to watch Wilbur and Orville Wright make aviation history near the town of Kitty Hawk. I hoped that once the technology improved and time travel was cheap and safe, it would be opened up to tourists. I would be first in line, and I had a feeling that Sabina would be by my side.

  I heard Abigail say something at the kitchen table, where the pair had been sipping on hot chocolate. She repeated it in English. “You can tell Julia, it’s all right.”

  I gave up the pretense of working and went back into the kitchen to hear Sabina’s story. She had put two and two together about what was going on in the TTE lab and had jumped to the conclusion that I was going to be fired from the dean’s office because I hadn’t reported Quinn’s plan to steal STEWie. And that it all had something to do with her. She had decided that the best thing for everybody would be if she left.

  “Nonsense,” I said firmly. “No one is going to get fired. The only one in trouble is Quinn.”

  “You protect me?”

  “I was protecting all of us, and that wasn’t how it went down anyway.” I drew up a chair, giving myself a mental kick for keeping Sabina in the dark for so long. Abigail had been right. Determined not to keep anything else from the girl, I launched into the whole story—how Quinn and I first met, his sudden move to Arizona, why he was back. Sabina interrupted me once to clarify a word—“EEE-lope, what this?”—but said nothing else as I recounted Quinn’s threat to expose her. “But I didn’t know he would hijack Dr. Baumgartner’s STEWie run or take Dr. Holm along,” I hurried to explain.

  When I came to the end of my story, Sabina stayed silent. She shook the whipped cream container, which had been emptied to top the hot chocolates, and got up to drop it into the trash with obvious reluctance—she hated wasting things that might be reused. She wiped her hands and turned back to Abigail and me. “Secrets—no good. We tell people, yes?”

  She was right, of course—secrets were no good. And Mary Kirkland was right, too, in her life philosophy—you don’t hide your scars. It was just that I—all of us—wanted Sabina to be at ease with the ordinary things in modern life, like tossing out empty whipped cream containers, before we threw her to the wolves. And Quinn was damned well not going to decide on the timing for us.

  I glanced at Abigail. “Let’s tell everyone once this dies down, or better yet, at the end of the school year,” I suggested. “Anyone want a slice of the apple pie? I think we still have some left.”

  The pie we had made with the Zestars the girls had picked at the orchard h
ad turned out pretty well. There was a quarter of it left.

  “That’s probably enough sweets for Sabina for now,” Abigail said. “We don’t want her ruining her dinner, Julia. She’ll need a good meal after all that exercise she got walking around town.”

  Was there a note of testiness in Abigail’s usually cheerful voice? She was Sabina’s legal guardian, of course. I was just Aunt Julia, which was how it should be. I hoped she didn’t resent me making the occasional suggestion. “Sounds like you have things under control. I’ll take a slice back to the office with me.”

  On my way out, I heard her say, “Sabina, do you have any homework for tomorrow? Math? Here, you work on that and I’ll get some research done, and we can make something for dinner after that. I bet Celer is hungry, too…Celer? Where are you? He’s somewhere napping, isn’t he?”

  “According to the directions on the stone, we’ll find the Norse camp a day’s journey to the north from Runestone Hill. Seems simple enough,” Nate said. It was late and we had all gathered in the TTE lab. Dr. Mooney was at his workbench, and the occasional whirr of a drill or clink of a hammer interrupted the discussion.

  “The Norse camp will be near two landmarks,” Ron said.

  Nate turned to him. “Yes, I wanted to ask about that. What are they?”

  “Unfortunately, no one knows. If the rune word in question is read as skjar, it might refer to a pair of skerries—small rocky reefs or islands—in which case we should look for the camp on a body of water like a lake or a river.”

  Nate frowned. “But the stone says that ten men stayed behind at the camp while the others went fishing. It doesn’t sound like the camp itself was on a body of water.”

  “Could be that they happened to pick an unusually poor fishing ground. Or the word might stand for two natural shelters of some kind…or something else altogether.”

  Nate had pulled out a modern map of our area and spread it open on the empty workstation whose monitor had been knocked to the ground the afternoon Quinn and Dr. Holm had left. “A camp a day’s journey from Runestone Hill…On foot or by boat? Let’s say that it was a combination of the two—rowing and portage.”