The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (18 page)

Nate had furrowed his brow. “I’d rather be too early than too late.”

“For the stone carvers?” I asked.

“For Dr. Holm. Quinn is looking for the stone carvers. We’re looking for them. Let’s make it mid-May, Dr. Baumgartner…And a full moon would be helpful.”

“How long are we giving it?” I asked.

Nate turned to me. “Giving what?”

“Ourselves to find them. I want to know how much snack food to bring along.”

He rubbed his eyes as if it had been a long day, or week. “We’ll have enough supplies for four days.”

At the computer, Dr. B was talking to herself. “Checking the moon phase calendar for the fourteenth century…full moon, the Julian calendar…May 9…” She looked up briefly. “Julia and Chief, can you give the Tuttles a quick rundown of History’s rules and tell them what to expect tomorrow?”

“Will do,” Nate said. “And professor?”

“Yes?”

“Get us there just before dusk.”

Over at Dr. Mooney’s workstation there was a loud clank, followed by a short hiss and a muffled oath. Something was clearly not going the professor’s way.

“Keep your fingers crossed that I can finish this by
morning
,”
he called out. “Otherwise, you’ll be on your own.”

18

Dr. Baumgartner had lent me her backup gear—she always kept a pair of bags ready in the travel apparel closet across the hall from the TTE lab. I had driven to campus in my jeans, hiking boots, and yellow St. Sunniva University sweatshirt, with a rain jacket and a sun hat on the passenger seat by my side. I had gotten up early enough to do one more thing on my way to STEWie’s basket.

The Department of Classical, Medieval, and Modern Languages (incorrectly but irreversibly known as the English Department) occupied a two-story building by the bend in Sunniva Lake, a five-minute walk from my office, which I took at a hurried clip in the hiking boots. The building had been constructed in the (mercifully) brief period when cement and boxiness were all the rage in campus architecture. I waited briefly outside the revolving doors as a student struggled to push his bicycle through, then went inside. I found Rosco in the basement, where he was tending to the building’s air system.

Rosco was the English Department’s custodian and the younger brother of Oscar, the security guard in the TTE building; their parents had given their sons names that were almost palindromes. Rosco explained that the building’s air system was never off—either the heating or the air-conditioning had
to be running at all times, which meant that it was always too hot or too cold. The cycle was on the heating half at the moment, and beads of sweat had broken out all over his forehead as he attended to the furnace.

I explained that I needed to get into Dr. Holm’s office.

Looking happy to have any excuse to get out of the hot basement, Rosco led me up two flights of stairs. I considered how unalike he and Oscar were—whereas Oscar never slept, Rosco always looked like he’d inherited all of his older brother’s sleeping hours plus some, with deep bags under his eyes and constant, mouth-stretching yawns. Or maybe it was the quiet atmosphere
that pervaded the English Department. There were no classrooms
here, only offices for professors, visiting fellows, and postdocs.

As he unlocked Dr. Holm’s office for me, Rosco explained that her officemate’s research fellowship had expired at the end of the summer but he hadn’t gotten around to taking the extra nameplate down. One of the two desks stood empty. On the other, journals and books sat next to a computer, organized into orderly stacks in a fashion that warmed my office a
dministrator’s heart.

“Lock up behind you when you’re done, Julia. I’ll be in the basement,” Rosco said, heading off with a yawn.

I unzipped my sweatshirt and took it off, rubbing my shoulder where I had received the starting dose of the plague vaccine. I dropped into Dr. Holm’s desk chair and suddenly felt weird about violating her workspace. But if she had been abducted, she would certainly want us to do everything we could to help. And if she had gone with Quinn willingly, she had committed a breach of university protocol, and we had every right to look through her things. I compromised by deciding to look only at whatever was sitting out in the open, and not to rummage through any of the desk drawers.

To make the whole thing seem official in case anybody asked, I sent Nate a quick email telling him where I was, figuring he wouldn’t see it until after we got back.

The books sitting on the desk were thick academic tomes on Germanic languages. I leafed through one quickly. It was a
dictionary
listing words and their pronunciations, the latter marked with those peculiar little symbols that linguists use in copious amounts, dots and other accent marks and such. The journals stacked next to the books were thinner but equally dense to the untrained eye. One article had a sticky note attached to it,
and I pounced on it, but it was merely one about the Kingittorsuaq Runestone, the one in Greenland that Dr. Holm had mentioned.
Curious about what that one might have to say—the runestone, that is, not the article—I found a translation on the third page. Apparently one Erling Sighvatsson, along with his buddies Bjarni and Eindridi, had built a cairn on a rocky island in the northern hunting grounds on a Saturday. Well, that was a rather mundane bit of business, unless you were one of the three gentlemen involved.

I turned my attention to Dr. Holm’s computer (which, after all, sat openly on her desk), but it was password protected.

I glanced around the small office. Textbooks and reference books lined the shelves, but there was not much in the way of
personal
belongings. Dr. Holm’s appointment was in its
second
year and would be running out soon, I knew. She probably had hopes of being offered a tenure-track junior professorship and a better office. According to Helen, the funding just wasn’t there at the moment.

I caught sight of something in the recycling bin to one side of Dr. Holm’s desk. And by caught sight of, I mean I dumped the paper bin onto the carpet, thankful that the cleaning staff hadn’t gotten around to emptying it yet. Wondering if Nate or one of his officers had already done this while searching the office, I shuffled the papers around until a stapled set of pages caught my attention. Dr. Holm had printed out a research proposal. Here and there sentences had been crossed out or reworded in red as she toiled on proposal number fifty in an effort to raise her batting average of three out of forty-nine.

I checked the time and quickly looked over the proposal. This was more like it. The introductory section touched on ideas that had been proven correct after being initially greeted with raised eyebrows. The theory of plate tectonics was mentioned, the
finding
of Troy, and the well-known but as yet unverified quote from Galileo—
Eppur si muove
(“And yet it moves”)—about Earth
circling
the Sun rather than the other way around. Dr. Holm stated boldly that the Kensington Runestone was a solid lead to proving a Norse presence in the Americas, before getting to the crux of the matter: Vinland. She wanted to find it and had a plan for doing so.

Back when she had shown me the runestone poster in the library, I had been left with the impression that the idea had already been turned down by Dr. Payne and that that was the end of it. But here was an all-or-nothing stab at a proposal—it looked like she had intended to circumvent Dr. Payne and seek funding from private donors. It was the right move on her part, as non-academic sponsors tended to be more motivated to support unorthodox research topics. She would still have needed Dean Braga’s approval to obtain a STEWie roster spot to look for the place she described in her proposal as being the land of “grapes and Leif Erikson’s footsteps” and the site of the first “Norse encounters with the Skraelings,” whoever they were—

I sat up abruptly.

Quinn wanted to find the runestone carvers. Dr. Holm wanted to find Vinland.

I quickly leafed through the rest of the proposal. Here was the plan set down in black-and-white, complete with a section titled
Strategy for Finding Vinland
and a color map. Dashed lines led from L’Anse aux Meadows inland and south to New England. She had planned to start at the settlement and see where the Vikings went.

I wondered if Quinn knew that she had her hopes pinned on a much bigger prize than the Kensington Runestone.

I tore off the page with the map, set the recycling bin upright, and remembered to grab my sweatshirt on my way out.

Helen spotted me through her open office door as I hurried down the hallway to return the key to Rosco. “Julia, come in. It’s my office hours,” she called out, inviting me to take the empty chair opposite her desk.

“Well—all right, but I only have a moment,” I said, remaining standing and stuffing Dagmar’s map into my pocket. “We’re leaving in ten minutes. Did you know that Dagmar Holm wants to find Vinland?”

“Who doesn’t? Do you want some coffee?” I shook my head. “I don’t know why I bother having coffee on hand…or why I bother with office hours at all for that matter. Students never come by in person anymore. I keep my cell phone number private, but they email me questions—most often in the middle of the night—and expect a prompt reply! And even then, they never seem to read past the first line. Never mind that. Who’s coming with you and Nate this time?”

“Ron and Ruth-Ann Tuttle—you haven’t met them yet, but they’re our experts in Dakota and Norse history. And Dr. B and Jacob. Are you sure you don’t want to come along to lend your opinion?”

“Julia, if you find a stone in the fourteenth century with runes chiseled into it, it will be authentic. You won’t need me there. Bring back pictures,” she said, echoing Dr. Payne’s words. “By the way,” she added, “how’s Sabina doing after yesterday’s adventure?”

“She’s back in school today. When we find Quinn, he’s going to have to answer to me for making her life more difficult than it already is. Speaking of which—” I glanced at the time on my cell phone and held up the postdoc office keys. “Can you do me a favor and give these back to Rosco? I think I need to run.”

19

The fourteenth century. Nate and I had already visited Runestone
Hill in two time periods—in its present form as a serene state park, and at the end of the nineteenth century, when the land had undergone a major transformation from wild terrain to farmland. Now we would be going six hundred and fifty years into the past, zipping past an unbroken chain of twenty-some generations in Mary Kirkland’s family, to arrive in the place where her forefathers and foremothers had lived. There was no concern on my part that we would be stepping into a ghost zone—it was a small hill in a marshy area—but I still felt a twinge of unease. My great-grandparents, contemporaries of Olof Ohman and his neighbors, had come to North America looking for a better life and found it. But the price had been paid by others.

“Thanks for joining us, Julia,” Dr. Little commented dryly as I ran into the lab, nodded at him, then hurried to squeeze onto STEWie’s platform. Dr. B, Nate, the Tuttles, and Jacob were already there and made room for me. Everyone was
wearing
hiking
shoes, layered clothing, and rain jackets. Nate had changed out of his uniform into more practical hiking gear and had a compass on his belt. I couldn’t help but notice that he had stuck with his plan to bring a firearm. He was also holding a large yellow mass made of rubber.

“What is
that
?” I asked.

“Since we can’t fit a real canoe in here, these two inflatable kayaks will have to do.”

“Will we really need them? They look cumbersome to carry, and they’re not exactly subtle.”

“They’ll come in handy if there are any big lakes we need to cross. Once they’re inflated, they’re pretty easy to portage.”

He thought for a moment before adding, “Sorry, I should have asked this before—can everyone swim? I didn’t bring lifejackets.”

He was addressing the Tuttles; Dr. B, Jacob, and I had already answered the question before we did the 1898 runs.

They both nodded.

“Are we sure we don’t need to make an effort to blend in?” Jacob asked a little apprehensively as Dr. Little entered the coordinates Dr. B had set for us and the mirrors started to inch into place.

“It doesn’t matter what we wear, Jacob,” Dr. B explained. “We will move like shadows, stealthily.” I figured she might be having a bit of fun with the young student.

“We could dress like Indians,” Jacob suggested.

Ruth-Ann shook her head. “Chief Kirkland, I hear that you’re part Dakota—”

“On my grandmother’s side.”

“Then you’ll know that we are about to enter the domain of the woodland dwellers—hunters, harvesters of wild rice, experts on the land, the sky, and plant and animal life. I don’t know a thing about time travel, but I imagine that even if you and I dressed in deerskin and moccasins, it wouldn’t make a difference because we don’t have a clue about how to behave in a way befitting the fourteenth century. Plus—your hair is too short.” Nate’s hair was shoulder length, which apparently wouldn’t cut it, so to speak, in the fourteenth century. “So that’s your answer, young man,” she said to Jacob.

“We could dress up like the Norsemen?” Jacob suggested next.

Ron shook his head. “But we wouldn’t know how to interact with Norsemen any more than we would with Indians.”

Dr. B agreed. “Any contact with either group would impact history to a large degree. It just can’t happen.”

Though I wouldn’t have minded a face-to-face meeting with one of Mary Kirkland’s ancestors or the Norsemen of the stone, I knew Dr. B was right. Which explained why Nate had felt confident enough to pack rubber kayaks instead of trying to squeeze authentic dugout canoes onto STEWie’s platform. If History allowed us to travel by boat, it would be because no one was close enough to see us.

Dagmar Holm’s map was burning a hole in my pocket, but it didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up, or her possible alliance with Quinn.

And so it was that we arrived on the top of a small, ro
cky hill
in a cluster—the six of us and two inflatable kayaks. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the new surroundings after the brightness of the TTE lab. The sun, red and large, was about to dip below the horizon. In the fading light, I could see that the trees on the hill had just sprung their buds. I breathed in the raw, sweet aroma of spring. A quick glance around told me that there was no runestone…at least not in our immediate vicinity.

Nate had put the uninflated rubber kayaks down and was making a circle of the hill, pushing at the dirt here and there with the toe of his hiking boots. “Well, I’d say there is no stone propped up for all to see, or even freshly buried.”

Dr. B was concerned with other matters. Scanning around with the Callback, our link to home, she let out a sigh of relief. “Our basket didn’t leave. They’re not here yet.”

STEWie’s basket had once been imaginatively described by Abigail as silver Jell-o floating midair in large clumps, if only you could see it. Dr. B’s instruments could—fragments of the basket hung all around where each of us had arrived.

“Good. We have the upper hand, then,” Nate said. “If Quinn and Dr. Holm jump here, the only way they’ll be able to leave the fourteenth century is with us.”

Dr. B went down on her knees to slide a thin probe into the soil. I assumed she was doing some kind of testing for the stone, but when I came over to look, she explained, “It’s a beacon, Julia. We learned pretty early on in the STEWie program how a place without familiar landmarks can be. This way, if we get lost, we can find our way back to the hill and STEWie’s basket by following the signal the beacon sends out.”

“I’m planning on navigating the more old-fashioned way,” Nate said, tapping the compass that hung from his belt. “Though I admit it will be odd not to have GPS. But you need satellites for GPS to work, and the nearest one is more than six centuries away.”

I mused that terms like
old-fashioned
and
modern
had loose meanings when it came to time travel.

He was repeating his circuit of the hill, this time looking all around us rather than down at the ground. The look of satisfaction he had because we’d arrived here before Quinn and Dr. Holm slowly melted from his face. I left Dr. B to her beacon and went to see what was wrong.

There was water all around us, serene and unrippling in the sunset. Runestone Hill was an island.