The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (17 page)

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 something 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

“Sa
bina, 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 had 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.”

I had never done one, but I knew a portage was when you carried your boat and gear from one lake to another. The term went back to early French fur traders, also known as Voyageurs.

“We need to estimate the distance they would have been able to cover in a single day. This sea where the Norsemen left their ships is a fourteen-day journey from the stone according to the directions on it—”

“Surely they would not have meant the Atlantic Ocean,” Ron
interrupted Nate. “It had to be a closer body of water. If their route brought them from the east, up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes, the sea would probably be Lake Superior. If they came from the north and sailed into Hudson Bay, that would be the sea they refer to. From there they would have followed the Nelson River or the Hayes River to Red River and into Minnesota. Neither route would have been easy or
straightforward
—imagine having to portage Niagara Falls!—but the Norsemen had plenty of experience. Their eastern trade route followed riverways all the way to Constantinople and reached as far east as Baghdad.

“The third possibility,” he added, “is that they came from the south, from the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, but no one takes that suggestion seriously. Which leaves the eastern and the northern options. We can talk more about it later—”

“Pick one,” Nate said.

“The eastern route, to Duluth. It’s the one early French explorers took.”

“Hmm. Well, Duluth to St. Sunniva University is a drive I’ve done a few times now.”

Named after the French explorer Daniel Greysolon, Le Sieur du Luth, the seaport town on the western tip of Lake Superior was Nate’s birthplace and his parents lived there. “It’s two
hundred
and twenty miles by car odometer, so about as many to Runestone Hill, then. If we divide that distance by the
fourteen day
s it took them, it means they covered, what, fifteen, sixteen miles a day? We can use that as our measuring stick.” He took a pencil compass from the lab catch-all bin and widened it to
fifteen
miles according to the legend on the map. Then he stabbed the point end of it on Runestone Hill and drew a short arc to the north before adding two lines radiating to it from the hill. “There. Fifteen miles from Runestone Hill takes us past Highway 94 on a line to Evansville and the Balgaard Wildlife Management Area. We should look for the camp in this triangle to the north.”

“Where do we want to land? Should we aim for the
teardrop
-
shaped pond again?” Dr. B asked from the other workstation, where she was readying our coordinates. As with the last time we’d used STEWie, we were skipping the typical check for ghost zones.

Nate shook his head. “We’ve already gotten our feet wet enough this week. Plan for sending us to the top of Runestone Hill. I think we can assume that at least will be dry.”

“What month?” Dr. B asked next.

This was a bit of a thorny point. We knew that seasons would not be that different in the fourteenth century: winters—white and frigid, with the occasional blizzard; spring—cris
p, w
ondrous, and brief as the land burst back to life; summers—green and humid, with the occasional thunderstorm; and autumn, a kaleidoscope of color. If we arrived on Runestone Hill early in the spring, it was possible that we would encounter lingering snow. If we waited until the summer, there was a risk we could miss the stone carvers—and therefore Quinn and Dr. Holm—entirely.

Ron considered the matter. “The Norsemen waited out the winter in Vinland, then readied their boats after the spring melt-off. Factor in a couple of weeks for river travel, then another two on foot or canoe to the Kensington area…It’s not likely that they would have gotten here before the end of May. Probably not until well into the summer.”