The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (15 page)

“About Dr. Holm—the text message of hers asking for help—”

“What about it?”

“It was all in capital letters. It’s hard to believe that someone who was panicked would stop to hit the caps lock button, if her phone even has one. I know it’s a very small thing—”

“It is.”

“You know this is her third postdoc, right? I looked up her university employment record. Before coming here, she was at Berkeley for two years, and before that, she spent eighteen months at Groningen University in Netherlands. Maybe she got tired of postdoc limbo, of waiting for a STEWie spot and an offer of a professorship. Quinn’s appearance may have been just the catalyst that she was waiting for.”

“And the overturned table, the text message asking for help?”

“To throw us off her track and focus our suspicions on Quinn.”

“So you think
he
is the one in danger.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, not until Nate said it.

“Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted. “I just think we shouldn’t take things at face value.”

“I never do.”

“Uh—good. In the meantime, Dean Braga’s trying to think of the best way to spin this.”

“It’s a big problem. Two people, a civilian and a postdoc, missing somewhere in the past on her watch. I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes. Let’s hope the problem solves itself and Quinn and Dr. Holm return of their own accord before Friday.” Nate checked his watch and got to his feet. “Ready? My grandmother said that we should come at one.”

I gave the rest of the cookies to Officer Van Underberg on the way out.

15

A one-hour drive in Nate’s Jeep, Wanda in the back seat, brought us to a craftsman-style house with a wide front porch. It was painted a warm blue, and it sat sandwiched between two houses bordering on MacMansionism on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River just south of St. Paul. We parked on the street out front. Wanda raced up the steps as if she was a frequent visitor to the house and gave a short bark. The door opened before Nate and I had a chance to reach the front stoop.

I had expected Nate’s grandmother, Mary Kirkland, to be a lot like him, that is to say, tall, lean, and a bit reserved in speech. She was none of those things. She was short and stocky in a denim dress, and, as I was about to find out, quite free with her opinions.

She rubbed Wanda’s ears, gave Nate a bear hug, which he returned somewhat awkwardly, and then turned to me. “And this is…?”

“This is Julia. Remember, Kunshi, I explained on the phone—”

“Nothing wrong with my memory. You two are here to ask me about the runestone. C’mon in.”

Wanda ran in ahead of us and we followed Mary down a hallway lined with photos of a life lived to the fullest. A husband who had passed away—Nate’s grandfather, Duncan, who appeared to be the source of Nate’s strong jaw and cheekbones. I counted seven children, three girls and four boys, some with their own progeny. There was a cute picture of what had to be Nate with a plastic spatula in one hand and a toddler-size chef’s hat on his head, helping Mary attend to a pair of roasting turkeys at a family picnic. I wondered if the picnic where Mary and Duncan had first met had started an annual tradition in the family—there were many picnic photos. In the middle of them, there was one showing Mary Kirkland handling a library book during her career as a cataloger at the Minnesota Historical Society, her long black hair streaming down her back.

Suddenly my own accomplishments, few as they were, took on an even more meager hue. I had one failed marriage (almost) behind me; a bungalow that I had inherited from my parents when they moved to Florida; and I was probably on the hook for loans defaulted on by Quinn. On the plus side, I did like my job, which, I’d come to realize, was a rare thing—it brought me joy to see young faces come to St. Sunniva University eager and idealistic about doing science and then leave four-to-six years later with a PhD in their pocket, a little wiser and more seasoned. Still, I couldn’t help wishing for something more; the STEWie bug had bitten me. I had caught the desire to feel the dust of other places and times under my fingernails and toes.

My eyes stopped at another photo on the wall. “Hey,” I said.

“Julia?”

“That’s my Mom! How funny. I don’t know who’s with her, though.” My mother Missy, looking unbelievably young, was smiling at the camera next to another woman of about the same age; both were carrying an armful of textbooks and had large hairdos.

Nate came back into the hallway and Mary turned on the lamp on a corner table so that we could all see better.

“That’s my daughter-in-law Gigi. Nate’s mother,” Mary explained of the woman in the photo next to my mother.

“It’s a small world,” I said. “They must have been friends at school. I didn’t know your mother attended St. Sunniva.”

“It was one of the reasons I applied for the campus security job at the school.”

“They were at the school in the seventies, just after it turned co-ed. It must have been an interesting time. I’ll have to ask my mother about it when she and Dad get back.” I thought it would be rude to say that my mother had never mentioned her friend Gigi from college. I would have remembered the name. But parents, I had come to understand in my job, rarely seemed to tell their kids much about their own college and graduate school experiences, other than how hard they studied for all their classes and how few parties they attended, busy as they were studying.

“You should ask Gigi about it,” Mary said to Nate as we followed her into the kitchen.

“I will. Julia, you said your parents now live in Florida?”

“They’re in charge of a retirement community in Fort Myers. They’re all gone, though.”

“I’m sorry?” Nate said.

“My parents, with their retirees. They went on a Caribbean cruise. It’s one of
those
cruises,” I added.

“Which?” Nate said with a nervous glance at his grandmother, like I was about to reveal that my parents were swingers or something. I suspected that not much would shock Mary Kirkland. Her hair, the black now streaked with gray, was tied back into a neat bun that framed a face weathered by life and crisscrossed with deep lines, more of them carved by laughter than sorrow.

“The cruise? It’s one where no tech gadgets are allowed,” I explained. “A complete, blissful disconnect from the hectic pace of modern life. I’m quoting the brochure there. No cell phones, no laptops, no emails, no text messages. Ship-to-shore communication only for emergencies, should one of the cruise guests come down with severe seasickness or worse. Apparently all the retirees happily signed on to the idea of no electronics. My parents said they might mail me a postcard when they went ashore to sightsee. I haven’t received one yet.”

I had never been on a cruise, electronic gadgets or not, but I figured that I’d get bored after twenty minutes of lying in a leisure chair on the ship deck, even with the onboard pool and shuffleboard and whatever else cruisers did to keep themselves entertained. The sightseeing, on the other hand, I would have enjoyed quite a bit.

“Sounds lovely,” Mary said from the fridge, where Wanda was waiting, her tongue hanging out in an unseemly manner.

“I’ve heard the cuisine on these cruises is good,” Nate said in the voice of one who would be uncomfortable in anything larger than a canoe, unless he was in charge of it.

Mary had taken eggs and a container with some kind of chunky white cheese out of the fridge. She scooped half of the cheese out, let Wanda have the rest, and headed for the stove. “Speaking of food, how about I make you kids something to eat?”

Mary sat us down at the large kitchen island that doubled as an informal eating area. Behind her, a grand cooking range held the spot of honor. Copper pots and pans hung suspended above the range, well-thumbed cookbooks lined a nearby shelf, and a rack with spices hung to one side of it. She was clearly a much more seasoned cook than I was.

Mary expertly cracked four eggs, added a dollop of creamy milk, and whipped up the combination while the pan heated up. I tried to reconcile her forthright manner with what Nate had told me about her life. She had been born in the Lower Sioux Community, on the banks of the Minnesota River, and then sent away to Pipestone Indian school at age six, where she had acquired her Americanized first name. (Her parents named her Yellow Bird.) Some of her friends had gone back to their Dakota names later in life, but Mary hadn’t. As I was starting to realize, she was a woman who did not do what was expected of her. I liked her very much.

According to Nate, her life philosophy was
You don’t hide your scars
.

Mary set some polenta slices onto a griddle to brown and asked Nate to make a salad. She poured the eggs into the pan, and, as the omelet sizzled, crumbled in the white cheese and added prosciutto and some parsley. She folded the omelet after a minute or two and turned it, not with the spatula, but by flipping it into the air. If I had tried a move like that, the omelet would have stuck to the pan, or, more likely, the ceiling. Maybe all it took was a firm hand and an equally firm belief that the omelet would obey the chef.

Accompanied by the polenta and the salad Nate had put together, the omelet was delicious. You would have thought that I’d be full after the lingonberry pie at Ingrid’s and the macadamia cookies in Nate’s office, but I was still making up for the seven hours we had been stuck without food or water in 1898. Next to me Nate, too, was digging into the food.

“What is this?” I asked, licking the softened white cheese off my fork. The taste was vaguely familiar.

“Feta cheese,” Mary explained. “I’ve been on a Mediterranean
kick this month for my cooking blog.”

I had come across feta before in finger foods I’d organized for school events, in spinach and cheese pastries, but never in its natural state. “You have a cooking blog?” I asked between bites.

“Just something to keep me busy in my retirement.”

I wondered if it would be rude to invite myself over to Mary Kirkland’s house more often. It was obvious where Nate had
gotten
his gourmet palate.

Mary watched us bolt down the food and added a second helping to our plates. “Don’t they feed you at St. Sunniva? Don’t mind me, I’m not hungry,” she added and set a coffeemaker brewing, then pulled up a chair. “You wanted to know about the stone.”

I swallowed a forkful of omelet and launched into the story of what had happened, holding nothing back. I had not planned to mention Sabina but somehow it all came tumbling out—Pompeii, Sabina, Quinn and Officer Jones, Quinn’s debts, seeing the stone disinterred, everything. Mary Kirkland listened, nodding occasionally. After I finished, she got up to attend to the coffee. She filled three mugs, pushed one in my direction, along with the milk and sugar, and said, “I’d like to meet this Sabina. She sounds like quite a young lady.”

I glanced at Nate. “We could bring her by sometime, couldn’t we? She hasn’t seen the Twin Cities yet, so we could make it a day of sightseeing.” I didn’t mean the traditional kind, where you might take a guest from out of town to see the caribou at the Minnesota Zoo or to shop at the Mall of America, but the kind where you wandered around on foot, just
looking
. I paused for another bite, then went on, “Mary, we were wondering if you had any insights about the runestone, either from your years at the Historical Society or from oral histories in your family.”

“About white explorers who might have made it to Dakota land in the middle of the fourteenth century?” She gave a deep sigh. “You’ll have to remind me of some of the details. You say they came on ships from Vinland?”

“Twenty two Norwegians and eight Gotlanders, the stone said. Ten stayed with the ships ‘by the sea’ and ten died.”

“How did they die—does the stone say?”

I scooped up the last of the omelet while I thought about how to delicately describe the most likely scenario. Nate shrugged. “A run-in with the Dakota or another local tribe, probably. One that didn’t end well.”

I remembered that I had read about another possibility. “Plague carried on the Norsemen’s own clothing or effects might have flared up. But I’m not sure it could have killed ten in a single day, unless the group that had been left behind was already ill.”

Mary sighed and set her coffee mug down. “I haven’t heard anything about the plague, but smallpox killed its fair share.”

We waited for her to go on.

“If I had your time machine, I wouldn’t look for a small party of explorers. I’d sweep down the land, from the ice-gripped Arctic lands all the way south to Cape Horn where the Pacific and the Atlantic meet. And I would count…”

Nate looked uncomfortable.

“I would count the dead,” Mary said. “When the Europeans came to the Americas, starting with Columbus, they unknowingly brought the virus with them. It swept through the land in lethal waves, like they had set a slow, unstoppable brushfire to clear their route for them. It spread from person to person,
village
to village, and community to community. Estimates vary—you’d be hard-pressed to find two historians who agree on the
matter
—but it’s possible that in the first hundred years of contact smallpox and other diseases killed every other person in the Americas, perhaps as much as ninety percent of the population. No one really knows the true number. Those are just guesses in the dark.”

I had put my fork down long ago. The plague—the Black Death—came up on occasion as a topic of discussion during planning meetings for STEWie runs to medieval Europe and Asia, and I knew that in that case the culprit was the
Y. Pestis
bacterium, carried by rat fleas. Our researchers were protected against it by a vaccine, and they also received vaccines for smallpox and other defeated diseases. But even the outbreaks of the Black Death had not been as deadly as what Mary was talking about. “What made it so bad?” I asked.

“The continent was a blank canvas for the disease. No one had any immunity to it, no genetic resistance…In the Old World, dense populations had lived in close contact with each other and livestock for centuries, experiencing waves of epidemics: smallpox, measles, the flu, tuberculosis…When de Soto’s ships came ashore in Florida in 1539, they carried a herd of pigs onboard, one of which may have been infected—Julia, is something wrong with the coffee?”