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

2

I didn’t ask how he knew. It was obvious. He must have let himself into the house to snoop around after everyone had left for the day. I’d never gotten around to changing the locks. He had probably waited behind the droopy willow in the front yard until Sabina—or the Pompeii girl, as he had called her—got on the school bus and I drove off to work in my aged Honda with Abigail Tanner, the third member of our household, in the
passenger
seat. Today, Abigail had forgone her usual mode of transportation, her bike, because of the rain.

I had gotten up to close the office door. That we had brought thirteen-year-old Sabina back from my one and only STEWie run was not common knowledge and I wanted to keep it that way. Five of us had ended up in Pompeii—with me had been Abigail, who was a graduate student in TTE and now Sabina’s legal guardian; Chief Nate Kirkland of campus security; a Shakespearean scholar by the name of Dr. Helen Presnik; and a second TTE graduate student, Kamal Ahmad. We had been marooned in the past by Dean Braga’s predecessor, who had planned to take control of the TTE lab by framing a senior professor for the crime. We had battled locals, disease, and Vesuvius’s fury—thereby confirming first-hand the correct date of the volcanic eruption in 79 AD—and had returned from the wild ride back through History with two extra people.

The first was one of our own St. Sunniva professors, who had relocated to the past for reasons of his own.

The second was dark-haired, bright-eyed Sabina, daughter of the merchant Secundus, granddaughter of the backyard herbalist and inveterate schemer Faustilla. We had rescued her from certain death in the eruption. That was how it went with time travel and its rules. You couldn’t change the course of History, not one of its twists or turns or side alleys, so if there had been the slightest chance that Sabina would have survived the eruption, we wouldn’t have been able to bring her back. Her footsteps would have been irreversibly intermixed with those of others along History’s road, and History protected itself. The very fact that we were able to pull her into STEWie’s basket with us meant that her life in 79 AD was over.

My ineptitude with plants and other things that needed nurturing aside, I had been prepared to act as the girl’s guardian, but Abigail had quietly stepped up instead. She had grown up as a foster child and had no family—and, also of some importance, had a working knowledge of classical Latin. The two of them, Abigail and Sabina, were living in the mother-in-law suite in the back of my bungalow, where Sabina had the small bedroom and Abigail the sofa bed in the equally small living room. Sabina had been living with us for the past four months, facing head-on the peculiarities of twenty-first-century life, from Twitter to toothpaste to canned tomato soup.

“How much do you know?” I asked Quinn, sitting back down and eyeing him from across the desk. He had helped himself to a couple more of the fudge mints while I’d been lost in thought. I pulled the cookie jar away from him.

“How much do I know? That you all broke a bunch of rules bringing her back.”

“Protocol. We broke protocol.” There
were
rules of time travel, like I said, four of them in fact, with one being the aforementioned
History protects itself
. I resisted the urge to list it and the other three for Quinn.

“Protocol, whatever. I couldn’t help but notice that that part of the story never made it into the news. That’s her, right?” He turned the frame sitting on my desk in his direction and examined the group photo in it. It was the seven of us who had returned from Pompeii at a Fourth of July picnic by Sunniva Lake. Quinn’s bangs slid over his forehead as he bent over the photo, his hair looking blonder than ever against his Arizona tan. His peach-colored short-sleeve shirt and perfectly seamed beige khakis seemed out of place in a rainy Minnesota September. I wanted to slap his hand away.

“Hey, Jules, what happened to your glasses?” He looked up from the photo. “Did you get Lasik or something?”

I couldn’t believe it. We had been married for six years—still were, technically, until the divorce proceedings went through—and he had forgotten that the glasses I used to wear were plain glass. I had worn them in an effort to be taken more seriously in my official capacity as the science dean’s assistant, having been confused for a student one time too many. Picture a small nose and round face under wavy brown hair that refused to stay pinned up. The brown of my hair was matched by the brown of my eyes, which was a bit of a mystery—I looked nothing like my parents, and the family pictures I had of my grandparents, who were long gone, all showed light-haired, prim-looking Norwegians.

Deciding that it was a wonder that Quinn had even remembered which building I worked in—the science dean’s offices were on the ground floor of the Hypatia of Alexandria House, a two-story brick building as old as the school itself—I explained about the glasses, hoping to change the subject away from Sabina.

“Huh. I thought you needed them for reading. You look better this way anyway. The glasses made you seem too bookish. I’m planning on plastering the Pompeii girl’s—what’s her name again?”

“Sabina,” I said reluctantly.

“I’m planning on plastering Sabina’s story all over the Internet if you don’t help me prove that the runestone is real, Jules.”

So much for changing the subject.

Who knew what evidence he possessed? If he’d been inside the house, he had no doubt seen the Pompeii photos that Sabina had taped up in her room. Also the lists Abigail and I had added all around the house to help her deal with modern oddities like which trash went into the garbage can and which into the recycling bin, and when to eat with your fingers (pizza, French fries, and chicken wings) and when with silverware (pretty much everything else).

“Wait,” I said, realizing something. “Is that why you’ve held off on signing the divorce papers? To blackmail me into doing this?”

He leaned back in the visitor’s chair, his arms clasped behind his head. If there had been room in my cramped office, he probably would have put his feet up on my desk. “Well, when you disappeared, we all thought you were dead, and there didn’t seem to be any point to signing the papers. Then when you showed up alive and well after five months, telling tales about the past, it occurred to me that the Time Machine would be just the thing to confirm Farfar’s story.”

“I can’t get you a STEWie run.”

“It would be quick, isn’t that true?”

“What would?”

“Going into the fourteenth century. Time zips by in the past but drags in the present, no? It’s a turtle here but a hare there when you compare clocks.”

“Something like that,” I said. So he did know something about the rules of time travel, because that was another one of them. Each hour spent in the past corresponded to only 133 ticks of the second hand on the lab clock. No one quite knew why.

“So we could get this pilot filmed and be back the same day, couldn’t we, Jules?”

“The answer’s no, Quinn,” I said firmly.

He leaned forward and took my hand. “Julia. The sooner we settle matters, the sooner I can sign the divorce papers. And do my best to keep Sabina’s story from going public, of course. Hey, do you want a spot on my new reality show? It could be arranged.”

At this point I might have been asking myself what I ever saw in the man, but I knew. He was a charmer, with his easygoing ways and handsome grin. His grand plans—like flipping houses in Arizona—and now this…well, it was just his way of doing things. He had hated his job as an accountant for the town’s electrical plant, the sameness of it day in and day out, but had given it a try for our sake, and I understood that. He had ultimately failed and, drawn by online photos of Phoenix bungalows and cactus gardens basking in perpetual sunshine, had left town with Officer Jones. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him, not even now. He was a disappointment to me—no more, no less.

“No, Quinn,” I said, letting go of his hand. “I can’t get you on a STEWie run. Not for a story passed down in your family, and certainly not for a reality show.”

He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I’m thinking of calling it
History’s Dirty Secrets
. I even have a tip on where I can get backing for the show. Wouldn’t it be something if I can prove that Farfar was right and that the Vikings really did come to the US? Once we film that, it’ll set the ball rolling, and we can move on to the JFK assassination, the Roswell Incident, and other mysteries…I’m full of ideas.”

I tried a different approach. “Look, I don’t know that what you have in mind is even possible. Big questions and important people are often the hardest to tackle. It’s just how time travel works.”

He grinned at me and got to his feet, cheerfully unhooking the frog umbrella from the chair back, not looking discouraged in the least by my refusal. Listening had never been one of his stronger characteristics. “Take the weekend to think about it, Jules. I’ll be in touch. I’m staying at Lena’s Lodge—unless you’d be willing to let me sleep on the couch?”

“I don’t think so.”

3

I was dialing the phone before the door had closed behind Quinn. Helen answered after the second ring. The no-nonsense historical linguist had been on many a STEWie run, including the Pompeii one. She was well known for having proven that Shakespeare
did
write his plays, by returning from a run to Bishopsgate in 1590s London with some well-shot footage. She was a senior professor with research interests that included, in addition to Shakespeare, classical Latin and Greek. She was also a good friend.

I told her everything.

“I hope I did the right thing in sending Quinn away, Helen,” I said, switching the phone to my left hand so that I could reach into the cookie jar for the last of the fudge mints. “I’m not sure what to do. I can’t get him a STEWie run like he wants, but we can’t let him expose Sabina either. It’s hard enough to be the new kid in school. Imagine how mercilessly she’ll get teased if the other kids find out that she’s from the first century. And if the media gets a hold of the story…”

Though every historian at St. Sunniva University would have given an arm and a leg to sit Sabina down and hear what life had been like for an ordinary person in the ancient Roman Empire, something that rarely made it into the accounts that had survived into the present before STEWie, we had agreed that privacy trumped academics. Sabina had not asked to be brought here, and we were not going to make a celebrity out of her. If she decided to share her story with the world when she was older—well, that would be her choice.

“You did the right thing, Julia.” Helen’s voice, trained by years of classroom lecturing, carried strong through the line. “And if he does break the news—well, the truth was bound to come out one day. When it does, Sabina will be fine. There might be some awkwardness for us here at St. Sunniva about how the whole thing was handled, but we’ll deal with it. Why does Quinn care about finding the runestone anyway? Historical finds rarely make anyone rich.”

Helen knew Quinn somewhat, having met him at a few of the school functions we’d attended as a couple.

“He seems to think the runestone would make a great pilot for a time travel reality TV show with him as the star,” I explained.

“It might, I suppose, though I would have thought the JFK assassination or something of that sort would be more marketable. It’s the first idea that people always bring up.”

“He’s saving that for a future episode. His grandfather played a role in digging up the stone, so he thinks that makes it perfect for the pilot.”

“I see.”

I slid the lid into its place over the empty cookie jar. “If Quinn asked for money so he could finance the reality show, I might have given him some. But not this, not an off-the-books STEWie run.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Julia. Still, I suppose we should prepare Sabina just in case. We can talk more about it this evening.”

I was hosting a get-together of our Pompeii family to celebrate Sabina’s first week of high school. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t bring it up, Helen. I don’t want to ruin Sabina’s party. Plus, I don’t want…uh, the others to know that Quinn is in town.”

“How are things between you and Chief Kirkland, anyway? Has he asked you out yet?”

Nate and I had formed a friendship on the Pompeii run, but that was the extent of it. I obviously still had some Quinn-related issues, and Nate had personal stuff he needed to work through as well. At least we’d come back from Pompeii with him calling me Julia instead of
Ms. Olsen
. It was progress. He had been gone most of the summer, which was quiet time at the school, on a team-building retreat. I hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July picnic.

“There’s nothing going on between us,” I said into the phone. “Besides, he just got back.”

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said Helen, who was given to quoting the Bard at odd moments. “Do you need me to bring anything tonight other than the balloons?”

“Let me check.” I moused the computer to life, closed the orientation booklet I had been working on, and opened the party to-do list. I’d already crossed off most of the items on it. “We’re looking good, if the weather clears up. I’m picking up the cake on the way home, and Nate is bringing the burgers.”

Cooking and I did not mix, even on outdoor grills, so Nate’s offer of being the designated chef was a welcome one.

“See you tonight, Julia—oh, wait, I have an idea. I should have
thought of it immediately when you mentioned the
runestone
. Why don’t you send Quinn to talk to Dagmar?”

“Who is she?”

“Dr. Dagmar Holm is a postdoc here in the department, a runic linguist. She might be able to explain to Quinn why the runestone story is just a myth—a popular one, but a myth nonetheless. Maybe he’ll accept an objective opinion better than a refusal from you.”

“I’ll see if I can catch him.”

“I’ll let Dagmar know.”

I hung up the phone and stuck my head out the window. The rain had tapered off. Quinn was in the courtyard, leaning on the frog umbrella as he chatted with a female
graduate
student. I thought I saw the dean’s straight back and black umbrella in the throng of students milling in and out of the courtyard on their way to class, so I waited until she had
disappeared
into the building before calling out Quinn’s name.

He turned in my direction, said something no doubt charming to the graduate student, and took a few steps over to the still-dripping white birch outside my office window. “Did you change your mind, Jules?”

“No. But there’s someone I want you to talk to. Her name is Dr. Dagmar Holm and she works in the English Department.” I pointed to the square cement building, somewhat of a
campus
eyesore, which squatted by the bend in the lake. Though everyone called it the English Department, its official name was the Department of Classical, Medieval, and Modern Languages. “She’ll be expecting you.”

“
Julia, is there a problem?”

I waved Quinn along and turned from the window. The dean had poked her head in on the way to her office next door. Formerly of the Earth Sciences Department, Dr. Isobel Braga was a geologist by training and my new boss. She was
not
one of the few people who knew the whole Pompeii story.

“Just a personal matter,” I explained. I grabbed the stack of referral letters that needed her signature from my desk and accompanied her to her office. “How was the meeting?”

Dean Braga had been showing potential donors around the
History Alive
exhibit at the campus museum. The exhibit represented the fruits of the STEWie project. One of its star attractions was a somewhat blurry photo, enlarged and taken from behind a bush, showing the muscular, tanned, and bearded
builders of Stonehenge in prehistoric Britain. In another
corner
of the exhibition hall, heartbreaking footage of the sinking Titanic taken from a time-traveling buoy looped in ten-minute intervals.

Dean Braga deposited her black umbrella with perhaps slightly more force than necessary in the coat rack just inside the door. “It didn’t go terribly well. I think I just wasted an hour.”

“They weren’t impressed with the exhibit?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. They’ve heard that MIT is constructing a bigger STEWie.”

That happened to be true.

“But bigger is not necessarily—”

“—better, yes. I tried to get the point across that the
reason
we’ve had trouble getting near primary historical figures is because of History’s constraints, not any fault on our part, and that MIT will face the same problems.” She dropped into the leather chair behind her desk and shook her head.

“They always ask why we don’t try again the next day and the day after and the day after that, as if each STEWie run isn’t such a large drain on energy and resources. I explained that research is never easy and that results rarely just fall into one’s lap—that confirming who shot JFK, which seemed to be their main interest,” she said, echoing what Helen had said moments earlier, “will take longer than the months of planning that the Department of American History has already put into the
project
. Hiding a fleet of cameras around Dealey Plaza is no easy task. And we have to make sure that the people placing them and retrieving go under the radar, too.”

“Did you explain that maneuvering in a time period not your own is ‘like navigating a maze?’ ” I asked, quoting Dr. Rojas of the TTE lab, who was on a well-deserved sabbatical, having gone through the stress of being wrongfully accused of murder. “That our researchers cannot always go where they want to, not to mention that there are ghost zones to worry about?”

“I’m not sure I got the point across. This salesman side of being a dean is going to take some getting used to. Their other idea—really not an original one to suggest to a
geologist
—was to go back in time to film the dinosaurs. The energy expenditure to go that far back, not to mention the danger to our researchers, the unknown factors they would encounter…I mean, the air itself was different.” She shook her head wearily, slid on her reading glasses, and held her hand out for the referral letters. She commenced reading the top one. After her predecessor, Lewis Sunder, had been arrested for sending five of us into a ghost zone and trying to frame Dr. Rojas, I’d joked that the new dean, whoever it turned out to be, could not be worse.

Dean Braga came close. Lewis Sunder had preferred to leave the day-to-day running of the dean’s office in my hands, dedicating himself to fundraising and to addressing the big issues, like whether theoretical researchers needed bigger offices than experimentalists, who also had lab space. Dean Braga attended to the details of STEWie roster assignments, funding requests, and conference travel forms with the same zeal she would have given a particularly interesting rock specimen in her career as a geologist. Saying she micromanaged did not do justice to the fervor with which she followed the path of every penny in the eight science departments under her care and checked every signature on every piece of paper. I hoped it was a temporary stage and would pass once she settled into her new role.

“You said you were dealing with a personal matter, Julia?” she asked, checking the figures in the letter against her notes.

I had considered telling Isobel about Sabina after she took up the post of dean, but was concerned that she’d think it her duty to tell the world. And she’d no doubt be furious with us for breaking time travel protocols.

“That was my ex,” I explained. “My soon-to-be-ex husband, actually. There were some matters we needed to settle.”

She took a pen and applied her signature to the first of the letters. “Let’s try to keep personal matters outside of work hours, shall we? Now, about the first pass at the spring class schedule…”

By mid-afternoon, I had rearranged some chemistry lab sections in the spring semester class catalog as requested by Dean Braga, helped a foreign student dealing with a visa problem, and listened to a phone message from a sophomore who had
completely
forgotten to turn in her final essay (“On the Early History of Weather Prediction”), but the professor who had taught the summer class had already gone on a sabbatical and was not answering her calls, so she had e-mailed the essay to me instead, and could I please forward it to him so that she’d get a passing grade—all of this even though the deadline had long since passed and the fall semester had already started. I jotted down a note to deal with it later in the day. Quinn’s words—
“I’m planning on plastering Sabina’s story all over the Internet if you don’t help me prove the runestone is real”
—kept running through my mind as I filled out budget forms. Finally, I decided I’d had enough. Dean Braga wanted personal matters kept out of the office and so did I. The best way to accomplish that was to make sure that Dr. Holm had been able to convince Quinn that his plan was unrealistic.

Besides, I wanted the matter settled before Sabina’s party tonight.

I looked up Dr. Holm’s contact information in the internal campus database, hesitated, then sent her a text message
introducing
myself and asking if she’d be available for a short chat.

She texted back,
Am in Coffey Library, in the stacks, come by.