The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (12 page)

Dr. Mooney turned his palms upward. “Don’t look at me. Except on the very first runs that Gabriel and I did, I always brought students along, no matter what the destination.”

“Exactly. This is a university,” said Dr. B, reaching for the Callback, the calculator-size device that would send us home at the touch of a few knobs. “Every STEWie run is a learning opportunity. Jacob needs to pick a thesis topic soon, and he hasn’t been on a run yet. This will be a good opportunity for him to get his feet wet.”

This time Nate definitely gave the professor an approving look.
I felt a small tinge of irritation. That was easy for Dr. Baumgartner to say—she wouldn’t have to answer to Dean Braga if anything went wrong.

“Somebody get me a map of—what town would it be?” Dr. Little barked out from the workstation.

“Solem Township, near Kensington,” Dr. Payne answered with the alacrity of one well versed on the subject, not because of any intrinsic interest in it, but for the pleasure of debunking it. He rifled through his folder and pulled out a copy of an old plat map of farmer Olof Ohman’s rural neighborhood. It was dated 1890. “The area hasn’t changed much. Current population, two hundred thirty-nine souls. The stone was planted and ‘discovered’ on the hill where this X marks the spot—”

Dr. Baumgartner had pulled up a modern map of the site on the workstation next to Dr. Little’s. “The coordinates of the
hill are…North 45 degrees, 48 minutes, 40 seconds…West
95 degrees, 39 minutes, 40 seconds.”

Nate leaned toward the monitor to get a look at the modern map. He pointed. “There. That teardrop-shaped pond. Get us right by it. I expect that the deep grass and reeds will provide some cover.”

Dr. Little threw a look in our direction. “Can all of you swim? I always like to ask that before sending anyone near water.”

We nodded.

“What day and time?” Dr. Little wanted to know next.

“The day the stone was dug up. That’s where we’ll find them,” I said. “There’s a date listed on the affidavit that Olof Ohman gave. August, I think. Do you have the document in your folder, Dr. Payne?”

Dr. Payne snickered. “Have you been reading popular
books on the subject, Julia? The affidavit was given eleven years after the fact and the date in it was just approximate. It
differs
in various versions of the story. August, September, and
November are the months mentioned most often by supposed witnesses.”

“We don’t know which month?” I said disbelievingly. If the witnesses couldn’t even agree on a month, that did not bode well for the stone’s authenticity—or for finding Quinn and Dr. Holm easily.

Nate seemed to take the matter in stride. “Witnesses are like that. If you question them about a break-in, about half will say they noticed a tall stranger on foot in the neighborhood, the other half will say the culprit was short and on a bicycle, and there’ll always be the odd person who claims he did it himself, but didn’t really.” He shrugged. “If anything, it’s a point in the favor of the runestone. When witness accounts are all identical, I tend to find them less credible.”

Dr. Payne’s only answer to this was an affronted sniff.

“That must be why Quinn and Dr. Holm took the Slingshot, so that they could jump around until they found the correct day,” I hazarded a guess.

Nate turned to Dr. Payne. “So we have August through November to work with? Let’s look for them one day at a time, then, all one hundred and twenty days if need be.”

“August 1 to November 30 is one hundred twenty-
two
days,” said Dr. Little, who liked to pounce when someone spoke with imprecision.

“We could cross-reference with weather data from the time period and rule out rainy days,” I suggested. “Do farmers clear land in the rain? If not, that would narrow it down a bit.”

“There’s a better way to look for a mark in time,” Dr. B said, beating Dr. Little to it. “We jump to the halfway point—October first. If the stone has been dug up already, that tells us that we need to look
before
that day; if it hasn’t, then
after
. Depending on which it is, we next jump to either September first or November first, and find out whether we need to look later in that month or in the previous one. Then to the fifteenth of whichever month, and so on. I imagine it won’t take more than a handful of tries.”

“That would be the way to do it, a binary search,” said Dr. Little, as if Dr. B’s suggestion should have been obvious to everyone without her long explanation.

I heard the lab doors open and shut. Jacob Jacobson had hurried over to join us in response to Dr. B’s message.

“Can you swim?” Dr. Little asked him.

“Yes,” Jacob answered breathlessly.

“I’m still not sure about bringing students along,” I said,
giving
him a long look.

There was no one to back me up. Dean Braga was at the observatory, and Dr. Mooney had left to begin the process of ordering the parts he needed to build the new Slingshot.

“Why are you so concerned, Julia?” Dr. B asked from where she was printing out a map of the Runestone Hill area for us to take along. “The worst we’ll probably encounter are mosquitoes.”

Abigail had come back in with Jacob. “Are we going to go look for Quinn and Dr. Holm? I volunteer to come along.”

“Me too,” said Kamal, who was still in his thesis-defense suit and math tie, looking more uncomfortable and out of place than Abigail, who hadn’t changed out of her period attire yet.

“I volunteer too.” This from Jacob. “What did I just volunteer for?”

Loudly enough to be heard over their voices, I said, “I was just anticipating Dean Braga’s objections to the matter. As to the nature of the run—we’re headed to an immigrant farm in the year 1898. In Solem Township, not too far from here,” I said to the students and quickly added, “Geographically speaking, that is,” before the three of them could remind me that STEWie calculations had to take into account everything from the movement of the Earth in space to rising ground levels. It would take Dr. Little some time to ready our coordinates.

“Huh, 1898,” said Kamal. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about Minnesota history. Will it be dangerous? You know, Indians and such?”

Dr. Payne looked at Kamal like he was considering revoking his positive thesis defense vote on the spot. “Young man, the year 1898 was just about forty years after Minnesota had become the thirty-second state. The Dakota War and the Civil War had come and gone, the grasshopper plagues that had devastated the crops of the local farmers were over, and the Great Northern Railway link from St. Paul to Seattle had been completed. The state population was skyrocketing, with European immigrants pouring in, drawn by farming opportunities and the thriving lumber and milling industries—”

“And, incidentally,” Dr. Baumgartner interrupted, “a girl’s school had been founded just about then by an immigrant couple, Knut and Agnes Hegge. Julia, the building where you work is the only one remaining of the three that originally comprised the campus, other than the church. It had a different name then, and the dormitory that stood next door is no longer there.”

“It would be nice to see what the school was like in the past,” Abigail said, “before we went co-ed.”

“It must have been kind of odd,” Kamal said. “Girls only, I mean.”

“I’d like to see the school—or anything else, really. I just want to go on a run. Any run,” Jacob said. During his first year, he had struggled with his graduate studies, but he finally seemed to have found his footing. I noticed that he was wearing a T-shirt with a Star Wars motif on it—a light saber–wielding Yoda hovered above the words
Pass on what you have learned
, making me think that a professorship down the road might be the right path for this student.

Kamal tugged at his math tie. “If you need me, I’d be happy to change out of this suit—”

“What’s going on?”

“And can we come along?”

“Wow, that’s a big mirror!”

Three more TTE students had walked in: Tammy, Sergei, and a new arrival whom I didn’t recognize, all eager to volunteer their services. It made me think we needed to be more restrictive about giving out the door code.

“All right, everyone out,” Nate commanded. “Except for you, Jacob. We’re going as is, no need for anyone to change. Dr. Little, are we good to go?”

“Just a bit longer. Don’t want you arriving in the middle of the pond.”

The five of us—Dr. Baumgartner, Dr. Payne, Nate, Jacob (looking like he couldn’t believe his luck), and yours truly—headed past the workstation where the monitor still lay on the floor, no one having had the time to deal with it, and to STEWie’s platform in the middle of the mirror-laser array. We scrambled onto the elevated platform and squeezed everybody in. Around us, like a wall-less elevator, a metal frame defined the limits of STEWie’s basket.

After the promised few minutes, the equipment in the lab started to come to life, and the mirrors began to pirouette into place in a slow, well-oiled dance. I knew what to expect: Once the mirrors had inched into place, STEWie’s generator would warm up enough for the cryogenic coolers under the floor to kick in, and it would soon get very noisy and very bright.

“What are we going to go see?” Jacob asked, his voice high with excitement.

“A runestone,” I said.

“We’ll be outside?” He pulled something out of his pocket. “Anyone want suntan lotion? I burn easily. I grabbed some insect repellant too.”

“Well, don’t spray it in here,” Nate said. “We’d all get a noseful.”

“I think I’ve heard of this runestone,” Jacob said as he slathered lotion on his nose and cheeks, having put the bug spray back in his pocket. “Chiseled by the Vikings, right?”

“If it’s authentic,” I said, “it will be proof of pre-Columbian exploration in North America by the Vik—by Norse explorers.”

“If we prove it’s real, can that be my thesis topic?” Jacob’s sneakered foot trod on mine. “Sorry, Julia, I’m just so excited. Can I tweet about this and take pictures for my blog? Everyone will want to know about it.”

“Not a chance. Put the phone away.”

“I could snap a few pics, write it up, and that would be that—a PhD with flying colors.”

Dr. Payne looked down his nose at him, as if Jacob had meant it seriously, which he may have. “A PhD requires more than just a few photographs, young man, even if the stone were genuine, which it’s not. You’d have to tell the whole story—who carved it, why they carved it, and how they happened to be there in the first place. Also what route they took inland, with whom they came in contact…I don’t believe coming along with us for the ride will count for much.”

“If it did, I could write up a thesis myself,” I said, raising my voice over the increasing rumble of STEWie’s generator. The last of the mirrors, the one that almost touched the balloon ceiling, came to a grinding halt. As Dr. Little called out from the workstation to remind us to cover our eyes, I asked Nate, who was on one side of me, “Isn’t Officer Van Underberg coming with us? We should be able to squeeze in one more.”

The officer was by Dr. Little’s workstation. He just seemed to be standing there doing nothing.

Nate shielded his eyes with a lanky hand. “I decided that he should stay here so that there are no surprises like last time.”

Before I could point out that the officer would hardly be able to tell by looking over Dr. Little’s shoulder where the professor was about to send us, we were on our way.

12

Jacob Jacobson got his feet wet, figuratively and literally.

Because what came next was a series of runs, a blur of light each time, followed by a cold splash as we arrived knee-deep in water among the reeds of what was not the small teardrop-shaped pond that the modern map had shown but an extensive marshland out of which several small hills sprouted. On our first jump, icy rain fell on our heads, the trees were half-bare, and the hillside on Olof Ohman’s land had been cleared for planting; on our second, it was hot and humid, the land was green and lush, mosquitoes were biting, and the runestone hill was fully wooded. One run was a total dud—somebody must have been in or around the pond, because we landed instead in the middle of a heavily wooded, impenetrable area. As we jumped back and forth between the past and present, our feet got wetter and wetter and we watched the township farmers go about their business, on foot or horse and buggy. Sometimes we saw things out of sequence, which was a bit odd. Runestone Hill on Olof Ohman’s farm was cleared of trees and pulled into service as a field, then it was woodsy, then it was somewhat cleared…

It took me a moment to get my bearings the first few jumps. The park that Nate and I had visited, with its picnic area and paved roads, was gone, replaced with spread-out farmhouses and barns and planted fields. Olof Ohman’s white farmhouse was not visible from our vantage point in the reeds, but even as limited as our view from the pond was, one thing was instantly clear—unlike the steady-state, modern Kensington area that Nate and I had visited, this was a place of
change
. Rightly or wrongly, sleeves rolled up, the newcomers were painstakingly shaping the land so that it resembled the European farms that they’d left behind in the old country. Acre by acre, marshland and woods were being transformed into farmland. This was a land in the grips of a transition—a deep, rapid, profound reshaping—and we were witnessing a small bit of it.

On the sixth jump we struck gold, so to speak.

Fall had come early to the Solem Township, and shafts of afternoon light broke through yellow aspen leaves, dancing around the farmer as he cleared his land. Occasionally he stopped to wipe his brow while digging beneath a mature aspen whose roots obviously extended deep into the soil. The five of us crouched in the lake reeds, unseen and unnoticed.

The pocket of my slacks hid the list of pros and cons that I had jotted down in the library. I had been very sure that I would be able to spot at once whether Olof Ohman was about to perpetrate a hoax on his neighbors and the world at large. The problem was,
because
I knew what was going to happen, it all looked pre-scripted, like I was part of an audience watching a play acted out onstage. If Helen had been present, she would have quoted the Bard in my ear:
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players
…which would not have helped at all in clearing up the issue. I was aware that a suspension of disbelief on my part might merely mean that the lights had been dimmed and the play had begun.

Pre-scripted or not, nothing was happening very fast.

Olof dug around the base of the old tree to loosen the soil, using his foot to push the spade into the ground. Even in the crisp fall air, clearing the field must have been hard work and the farmer’s brawny, begrimed arms tensed and strained under his shirt and overalls as he worked the dirt. To one side, a couple of trees had already been cleared, leaving gaping holes in the ground. Farther down the hillside, a wooden fence separated Olof’s farm from his neighbor’s, and beyond that was a second farmhouse, where a hatted figure worked the land, his back to us.

After a few minutes of digging around the base of the tree,
Olof Ohman started to look—for want of a better word—
irritated
at some kind of obstruction. Pausing to wipe his brow, he set the spade aside and picked up an axe. He proceeded to hack at the roots of the tree, loosening them further for the felling that was about to happen.

That was when I noticed the boys. There were three of them, and two—Olof Jr. and Edward—were alike enough to be twins, except for the difference in their height. The third was a smaller boy, blond and thin. He could only be Magnus Olsen; a golden-haired ragamuffin of a child, he looked so much like Quinn that I was momentarily thunderstruck. All three were wearing overalls and caps, and it looked like they were helping Olof clear out some of the underbrush. Realizing that he was about to pull down the aspen, they abandoned what they were doing and ran over to watch. No kid of any century passes up the opportunity to see a tree get cut down.

Olof gave the roots one last whack with his axe, then waved the boys to one side, out of harm’s way. They obeyed without argument. The farmer set the axe aside and readied a winch of some kind, which was connected to the tree with a thick rope. He turned the crank on it.

I could feel the tension creep up my arms like a sudden chill in the air, the anticipation hard to bear. This was it. A strand of History was about to unravel, the stone would be under the tree or it wouldn’t, and either Dr. Payne or Quinn would be proven right.

Olof turned the crank harder.

Nate elbowed me in the side.

“Ow. What was that for?” I whispered to him.

He nodded toward Dr. B, whose beige slacks had been darkened to just below her knees in the water, and who had the Callback out. She was moving it left and right, scanning for something, a frown on her face. Next to her, Dr. Payne’s eyes were glued to the action on the hill, his facial expression one of disdain as he recorded the event with the video camera in his hand. Jacob, in front of me, seemed dumbfounded by the experience of time traveling. He kept pinching the reeds nervously as if checking whether they were real. We hadn’t lingered long on the other runs, so this was his first chance to
feel
the past.

Nate nodded toward Dr. B again. Was there an issue with the basket? Had it returned to the lab, and did that mean Quinn and Dr. Holm were here? I glanced around to see if I could spot Quinn’s blue eyes and blond hair peeking out from behind a barn, but didn’t see anything. I sent a small shrug in Nate’s direction and returned my attention to the hillside. It was impossible not to.

The winch rope had tightened and the aspen was teetering, as if deciding whether it wanted to fall. After a moment of indecision, like everything was happening in slow motion, gravity took over and, with a great crack and a thud that carried over to where we were crouching, the aspen came crashing down, roots and all. Involuntarily I took a step forward in the water. A gray object had emerged from the ground, still clasped in the tree’s roots, its face now turned to the sky. Root and rock had come out in a single earthen lump, and I realized that the sensation that I was watching a play had vanished the moment the stone emerged from its resting place. It seemed like it had been underground forever.

Olof Ohman stood back and wiped his hands on his overalls, giving us our first full look of his face as he took off his cap for a moment to cool off. I caught a glimpse of a strong chin and bushy eyebrows above a walrus mustache before the cap went back on.

“I’ll be damned,” I heard Nate whisper next to me. “He was telling the truth. He did dig it up.”

Olof had returned with the axe to hack away the roots, then used a grubbing hoe to flip the stone aside with one large heave. Once that was done, he wiped his forehead and focused his attention on detaching the winch from the fallen tree. Meanwhile, the boys took turns trying out the stone as a seat.

There was laughter and jostling for a position on the rectangular slab.

I wished I had a watch so I could check whether time had really stopped moving or whether it just seemed that way because I was impatient for the boys to notice the runic writing.

The younger of the Ohman sons was scraping clay off the stone with his foot when he suddenly started shouting, his excitement carrying over to where we were hiding in the reeds. All three boys went down on their knees, sweeping away more clay and dirt, but now with purpose. Young Magnus Olsen had taken off his cap and his blond bangs slid onto his forehead, like Quinn’s were given to doing, as he helped the Ohman sons wipe off the stone, using his cap to accomplish his part. A conversation was held and the boys called for Olof Ohman, who was prepping the base of the next tree. They made room to let the farmer take a look. He bent down for a long moment, then straightened up and said something to the older of his sons. The boy fetched water from what looked like the remains of the farmer’s lunch on a nearby tree stump. It was poured onto the stone to further dislodge the dirt and expose what was underneath.

Farmer Ohman stood still for a moment, clearly at a loss. Finally, with a shake of his head, he turned and, cupping his hands, called out to the hatted figure working on the neighboring farm. The neighbor didn’t hear him at first, so Olof Ohman called out again, louder, what sounded like a name:
Niiiils
. This time the neighbor heard and, seeming happy enough to take a break from working on his own field, clambered over the short wooden fence that separated his land from Olof’s. The new arrival took off his wide-brimmed hat, peered at the stone, touched it. He checked out the downed aspen and bent to look at the hole the tree and stone had left in the ground, shaking his head in wonder. The two men stood stroking their identical walrus mustaches, mulling over the matter in a reserved, classically Scandinavian kind of way. We could not hear what was being said.

A thought occurred to me, an odd one, unconnected to the play we were watching. We were a small group from the future, observing and recording an event as it unfolded, and none of the participants were aware of our presence. Five of us, five of them. Audience and actors. Who was to say that someone from farther
along in the future wasn’t around watching
us
watch Olof Ohman
and his sons and neighbors? A traveler from a thousand years into the future using some sleek version of STEWie that documented
all
of the world’s past for future generations, chronicling every word, every action, every flutter of History’s pages in some overwhelmingly large database. I shook off the thought. I suspected that if I did this long enough, I would acquire the habit of looking over my shoulder to check for STEWie travelers from the future. Not that my life was overly interesting, but you never knew.

Dr. Payne adjusted his position to get a better view of the hilltop with his video camera, and the gentle rustling of the reeds broke through my reverie. I noticed that Nate, standing near me, was staring intently at something, his body perfectly still, only his eyes moving. I elbowed him back, almost causing him to lose his balance.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “What do you see?”

“There.”

I followed the line of his arm to a sturdy oak in an as-yet-uncleared bit of land. Behind the autumn-hued leaves rustling in the still afternoon, I saw a flash of blue among the thick brown branches. How had I missed them? I even recognized the shirt, which Quinn had worn the morning we eloped on a beach in San Diego—it was dark blue, like Oscar had mentioned, with parrots on it. Above him, one branch up, a petite figure clung to the trunk. I had been too preoccupied with what was happening on the hill to notice them before.

They didn’t seem to have spotted us yet.

Nate and I both tried to make a move, but we were only able to take a few halting steps in the water before we were forced to a stop. History, protecting itself. Had we charged out of the lake in the direction of the oak and its two visitors, the men and boys on the hill would have seen us, and it would have taken their day in a completely different direction. Being prevented from moving by an invisible barrier was an odd sensation, but I knew that it wouldn’t last, so I made an effort to relax. In the worst case, we would be stuck until Olof Ohman finished for the day and could make our move then.

Still, I hoped we wouldn’t have to wait long. I was itching to confront Quinn over the problems he had caused me at work. Not to mention that my feet and socks were sopping wet inside my shoes. I felt something brush against my leg and hoped it was a small fish and not a snake.

The men on the hill had come to some sort of a decision, which seemed to be that they would put aside the stone and get back to work. The neighbor—Nils Flaaten, I suddenly remembered from my library reading—headed back to his own farm with a friendly wave to Olof.

Another call came, I couldn’t see from where, and the golden-haired child, Magnus Olsen, left for home, too. The last we saw of him, he was trying to clean the dirt off his cap by rubbing it on his pant leg as he sauntered along.

I wondered if Quinn was glad he’d come. What was
I
thinking
? Of course he was glad. He had been proven right.

In front of me Jacob, who was snapping pictures with his cell phone, jumped as if something had grazed his leg, probably another of the small fish. Nate and I both shot out a hand to steady him, but not before Jacob’s arm splashed the surface of the water, loudly, and his phone sank out of sight.

I don’t know if it was the movement or the sound that alerted Quinn and Dr. Holm to our presence, or if the two had already gotten the footage they wanted and were ready to leave. In any case, we saw a rustle of blue on the oak where they were perched, a flash of light like sunbeams reflecting off fresh snow…and then the two figures up the tree were gone, leaving the orange leaves stirring behind them as if in a sudden wind.