The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (13 page)

Nate turned to Dr. B and asked in a hard whisper, “Are we stuck here? Did our basket leave?”

We watched Dr. B press a sequence of keys on the Callback as if she was double-checking something she already knew.

Nothing happened.

“Bad luck,” she said. “We’ll have to wait for Steven to send another one.”

I hoped Dr. Little would be quick about it. I felt a sneeze coming on, and what with the chill in the air and my damp feet, I didn’t want to catch a cold. And we had seen what, or rather who, we had come to see and had not been able to do anything about it.

Dr. Payne looked a little shaken, and my guess was that it wasn’t over the basket issue. “We could try to, uh, explore a bit…though I doubt that History would let us. Not dressed like this, anyway. She’ll probably pin us in place.”

Jacob tried to push through the reeds and of the water, but something stopped him short.

“History doesn’t want us wandering around in the nineteenth century. My hat’s off to her,” Nate said. “Let’s not anger her by leaving anything behind.” Pondering the question of whether History really was a
she
, like an extension of Mother Nature, I shook off my chill and joined Nate in trying to help Jacob find his phone. We stuck our arms into the cold water and groped the bottom of the marshy lake.

But the cell phone was gone, lost in the muddy, weedy
bottom
. There was nothing to be done but take a last look at the hill, where the day had reverted to ordinary, squeeze the excess water from our sleeves, and wait to be rescued.

We had found out this much, however—Dr. Payne had been wrong and Quinn had been right. I gritted my teeth at the development. At least we had guessed correctly where our missing pair had gone…and we had a good idea of where to look for them next.

13

“A
nd then the farmer pulled the tree out of the ground, and out came the roots and the stone, dirt flying…”

I was relaying the day’s events between bites of takeout from Panda Palace. Helen had joined us at the house for a late dinner, eager to hear the story. She and Abigail had suggested that we might as well tell Sabina about Quinn’s blackmail threat, since the newest developments did not involve her, but I suspected that I already knew what her reaction would be. Sabina was as headstrong as her father, who had opted to stay in Pompeii and face the eruption on the off chance that he could save his mother and his shop. She’d probably make a curse tablet with Quinn’s name on it—or a replica with pen and paper. I wanted to discourage that sort of thing.

“I hate to say it, but it looks like Quinn was right about the runestone.” I was utterly famished and still chilled to the bone. Dr. Little had sent another basket as soon as ours returned empty, but the bare minimum of time required for the equipment to cool off was fifteen minutes, which had translated into almost seven hours for us in 1898. At least after the first four had passed we had been able to squelch out of the water and wait out the remaining three on dry land in the fading light. My toes were still pruney.

The first thing I had done once we had made it back to the present—that is, after a hot shower and coffee—was to add one more item on the
Pro
side of my list about the runestone. I had seen it come out of the ground with my own eyes. As had Quinn and Dr. Holm. Their next stop would be the fourteenth century. In the morning, we would regroup and come up with a strategy to find them. I pushed the thought aside and continued to describe for my audience the day’s adventure, Sabina interrupting between mouthfuls to have a word explained—marshland, aspen, overalls, walrus mustache.

“We watched Olof Ohman pull the tree down, an old one—he would have hardly needed a winch otherwise. That’s a big crank that you turn by hand,” I added for Sabina’s benefit. “The roots were tightly wrapped around the stone, like it had been in the ground for a long time.”

“So it’s real.” Abigail gave a little sigh of satisfaction. Having been brought up in a string of foster families, Abigail had a bit of a romantic streak and a soft spot for happy endings. Still, I felt compelled to reply, “Well, it might not be. Doctor Payne still thinks that Olof Ohman could have buried it under the tree, only to ‘discover’ it several years later.”

“He would. I kind of want it to be true—oh, sorry.” Her cell phone had beeped. I belatedly remembered that I had meant to ask everyone to turn off their phones for the duration of the meal. I wanted to set a good example for Sabina.

Abigail checked the message. “It’s Jacob—huh, he bought a new cell phone, he says. I wonder what happened to his old one.”

“He dropped it into the lake on Olof Ohman’s farm,” I explained. “We couldn’t find it. He bought a new one somewhere this late?” It was almost ten by the kitchen clock, but much later for me. I fought a jaw-stretching yawn.

“The Emporium was still open.” This was Thornberg’s carry-all store.

“There is a word for that.” Helen did something she rarely did, scrunched up her nose; she wasn’t exactly a Luddite—without technology, there would be no STEWie—but she wasn’t the biggest fan of modern gadgets either. “
Nomophobia
. Anxiety experienced by cell phone users when they forget their phone at home or the battery dies and they are out of contact with friends and family. The term is a shortened version of
no-mobile-phone-phobia
. Researchers have found that the stress levels are similar to those experienced on a dentist visit.”

Sabina scrunched up her nose. “Dentist, I no like.”

“And Jacob no like being without his cell phone,” said Abigail, who was exchanging a series of text messages with her fellow grad student. “I don’t either…or without my laptop. Does that mean I have
lapophobia
? Jacob says he’s going to go borrow his parents’ car tomorrow so that he can go back to the lake to see if he can find his old phone.” Unlike most of his office mates, who had rooms in graduate residences, Jacob lived at home and biked to campus. His parents ran a combination bookstore/antique shop in town.

“There’s no reason for him to retrieve the phone from the bottom of the lake, not from the point of view of History,” Helen said. “It’s already been there for over a hundred years without drawing any attention.”

“And the warranty must have expired by now, right?” Abigail said with a snicker as another arriving text message beeped. “I think he has hopes of retrieving his list of contacts from it. He says he’s heard that if your cell phone gets wet and stops working, all you have to do is place the phone into a bag of uncooked rice overnight and the problem is solved…A bit optimistic, if you ask me, since his phone has been lying at the bottom of a muddy lake for more than a century.”

Sabina leaned over to look as Abigail texted Jacob back, and I was momentarily amused by how quickly she had accepted cell phones. Really, if you thought about it, it was quite astonishing how Abigail’s typed letters turned into invisible waves that bounced off cell towers and into Jacob’s new phone, then became letters again.

“Anyone want the last potsticker?” I asked as Abigail put the phone away. Celer, who was dozing in one corner of the kitchen, twitched in his sleep as if experiencing a pleasant dog dream. The potsticker was waved in my direction and I proceeded to dig into it.

After Abigail and Sabina had cleared the table and taken the dishes into the kitchen, Helen said, “So Dagmar will take Quinn into the fourteenth century.”

“Presumably.” Then Helen’s phrasing sank in. “Helen, you don’t believe Quinn made her go at gunpoint either, do you? Officer Van Underberg suggested it, and Nate seems to think it’s a real possibility given the text message she sent me.” Why had she sent it to me and not the police or someone in her own department? Had she grabbed her phone and texted blindly, sending the message to the most recent number in her history? I didn’t like the thought.

“I don’t know if he made her go or not,” Helen said. “Even if he didn’t, I think that our Chief Kirkland will always be bothered by anything your ex does…except, perhaps, if Quinn leaves town for good.”

I waved off her last comment. “I wish you had been with us today. I can’t tell if Dr. Payne is being contrary because he wants to be proven right, or if he’s just being cautious with the evidence at hand, as an academic should be. ‘Further runs are obviously warranted,’ ” I said, mimicking Dr. Payne’s snippy tone. “He spent most of the seven hours we were stuck in the mud explaining his position to us. And he wasn’t talking about Quinn and Dr. Holm. I don’t know how historians coped before STEWie, really I don’t.” It was maddening that we still didn’t know for sure if the stone was real after all we’d been through. “Relying only on documents and what’s left behind in the dirt—not being able to check things directly, in person—that would drive me crazy.”

“Trying to figure out what really happened…well, that’s half the fun, Julia. STEWie is only a tool that helps us do that. As you found out, even something that you see with your own eyes needs to be interpreted and put into context.”

There was a lot of truth to her words. If Quinn hadn’t been involved, I suspected that I would have greatly enjoyed solving the mystery of the runestone.

“But yes, STEWie is a wondrous thing, there is no denying that,” Helen added. “Xavier’s certainly having fun. He’s up to his elbows in electronic parts and whatnot, building another Slingshot. Kamal is helping him.”

“Nate asked him to hurry. We are all a little nervous about relying on STEWie alone and getting stuck in the fourteenth century after what happened tonight.”

“Why don’t we just leave Quinn in the past?” Abigail called out from the kitchen. We could hear the clink of cups and plates as she and Sabina loaded the dishwasher. “Problem solved.”

“Well, I think Dr. Mooney wants his Slingshot back. And we all want Dr. Holm to return safe and sound, don’t we?” I called back.

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, they 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.