The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (5 page)

Letting Wanda have her way with the Frisbee, Abigail and Sabina returned to the deck. Abigail’s short green hair stood up perfectly still in the light breeze, as if the styling mousse had imparted a statue-like quality to her head. She poured the diluted wine into glasses for herself and Sabina—Kamal didn’t drink alcohol. Slumping into a chair, she took a long sip.

“Ahh, I needed that,” she said. “Wait, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean the wine—although I’m not complaining about that part—it was hot trying to keep up with Wanda.” She downed some more of the watery wine and turned to Kamal with a snicker, though not a mean one. She was very fond of him in a platonic, sisterly fashion. “There’s the man of the hour.”

“What’s this?” I asked.

Kamal puffed out his chest. “The run to Neander Valley I just got back from was
quite
fruitful, so to speak.”

“It’s big news all over campus. He got footage, didn’t you hear, Julia?” Abigail snickered again. “Of an early human and a Neanderthal
making out
—”

“Just thirty seconds worth,” Kamal interjected. “From a distance.”

“—and maybe even interbreeding. Though we’d probably have to wait nine months to find
that
out. Which way?” she asked as Kamal took another serene sip of his lemonade.

“Which way what?”

“Cro-Magnon woman or man?”

“Oh. Cro-Magnon man, Neanderthal woman, though we saw other examples. It was a ten-day run. Which is why I’m
hungry
.” He reached for more chips.

Kamal’s ten-day run would have passed in just about as many hours in the lab.

“Was it a lovers’ tryst in a cave or something?” Abigail asked in a somewhat dreamy voice. Sabina interrupted before Kamal could answer. “What is
Ne-ander
and this
mate
-ing?”

Abigail gave her a somewhat muddled explanation of the matter, drawing on her knowledge of academic Latin enriched by colloquialisms Sabina had taught her. Both of them ended up in a paroxysm of giggles.

After their laughter subsided, I asked, “Kamal, you’re not thinking of showing any…uh, inappropriate footage at your defense, are you?”

Kamal shook his head over the lemonade. “Don’t worry, Julia. It will all be very tasteful. The slides will be the whipped cream on the pie of my defense.”

“I’ll bet,” said Abigail.

I wasn’t so sure my definition of tasteful coincided with Kamal’s, so I decided that I’d better drop by his office on Monday morning to do a quick check before his defense that afternoon. Besides the three professors who would form the chairing committee, there would be students and other guests present, especially if the rumors about Kamal’s latest results got around, which I strongly suspected they would. Nothing stayed secret for long on St. Sunniva’s campus. In fact, I was surprised the news had taken this long to reach me—I must have been distracted by the whole thing with Quinn.

“I wish I could come to your defense,” Abigail said regretfully, “but I have a run with Dr. B on Monday. For some more data on Antoine and Marie-Anne.”

I felt a small and completely unexpected stab of envy at how casually they talked about time traveling. Dr. Holm and Quinn were both desperate to use STEWie—and, truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded having a second chance myself, perhaps to see the Beatles perform in concert after all, like we had originally planned before being sidelined to Pompeii. As for Dr. B, she was Dr. Baumgartner, a junior TTE professor and Abigail’s advisor. Antoine and Marie-Anne were Monsieur and Madame Lavoisier, an eighteenth-century chemist and his assistant wife, the latter of whom was the topic of Abigail’s thesis.

“Jacob Jacobson, will he be at defense?” Sabina asked. She had a bit of a crush on the ginger-haired, social media–addicted second-year grad student who shared an office with Abigail and Kamal.

“I suppose so,” Kamal said in the tone of one who couldn’t care less.

Nate came out carrying the food, with Helen on his heels. She quickly closed the screen door behind her at our call of
Boxelder bugs!
Helen greeted everybody and Nate, after stirring the charcoal, began arranging the burgers on the grill.

Just as I had, Abigail eyed them with suspicion. “What are we having?”

“Salmon burgers, Miss Tanner,” Helen said, taking a seat in one of the deck chairs.

“You’ll like them,” Kamal said.

“Fish, yes?” Sabina said as Nate made room for her to help at the grill.

“Give them a try,” I said as Abigail pulled a face. “I have some hotdogs in the fridge if the burgers don’t work out.”

The first time the mention of hotdogs had come up, we had hurried to reassure Sabina that they didn’t contain dog meat, of course, but somewhat disconcertingly, she hadn’t seemed particularly bothered by the idea.

After he and Sabina had set the cover back on the grill, Nate turned to ask Abigail and Kamal how their research was coming along, which brought up the topic of the Neanderthal and C
ro-Magn
on social relations again. Helen, as befitted one well-versed in history, was most interested and asked Mr. Ahmad, as she called Kamal, for a full account. Nate seemed to be paying close attention, too.

My cell phone, which I had set down on the table with the drinks, rang, interrupting Kamal, who was providing details about the Neanderthal family structure. “Sorry, I thought I turned it off,” I said and glanced at the caller ID. Quinn. Great. I swatted away a boxelder bug, said, “I better take this,” and went back into the house to take the call.

“Still at the office, Jules?”

“No, I left a bit early today,” I started to say, then realized I didn’t owe him an explanation. There was no reason for me to be defensive about my long work hours anymore. “What do you want, Quinn? The answer is still no. I can’t get you on a STEWie run.”

“Guess what, Jules—I signed the divorce papers. I’ll put them in the mail tomorrow.”

“Oh. Er…thanks. What about Sa—…the runestone? You’re not still expecting me to take you into the past, are you?”

“Certainly I am. You’ll figure out a way to do it.” He added, “How was Sabina’s first week at school? Can’t be easy getting used to a new place.”

The question sounded genuine. He wasn’t heartless, just an opportunist. No, that wasn’t right either. A better description was that he was self-centered, cheerfully and optimistically so, like many a freshman newly arrived at St. Sunniva University. To Quinn, the world existed for him…and him alone. It just hadn’t realized it yet.

“Sabina’s first week went okay, as far as school can,” I answered as I tried to figure out whether I had any leverage on
him.
I came up empty. “She was surprised to find that we’ve outlawed corporal punishment, and that boys and girls go to school in equal numbers.”

“Modern society got some things right, didn’t it?” His good mood was evident even through the phone. I didn’t like it.

“Listen,” he continued. “I gotta run, sorry. I’m meeting someone at Ingrid’s.”

I wondered if the
someone
was the female grad student he had been chatting up in the courtyard outside my office. I almost said,
Enjoy the lingonberry pancakes
, which was his favorite dish there. Mine too, as it happened.

“You have my number, Jules,” he went on. “Let me know when you set things up. I’ll check in after the weekend. If you haven’t gotten things sorted, I’ll start making calls to news stations.”

He hung up.

I left the phone on the kitchen counter and turned to go, only to see that Nate had come back inside, noiselessly sliding the screen door open and shut behind him. I wondered how much he’d overheard.

He headed for the sink to drop off the empty food platter.

I cleared my throat. “Quinn is back.”

“Is he?” Nate said without turning around as he rinsed the plate.

I realized he might have misunderstood me. “No…not in that way. He—we—have some paperwork to take care of, that’s all. It’s nothing important.”

Nate gave me a frank look over one shoulder. “Good, then.”

He held the screen door open for me as I carried the buns and condiments out onto the deck. Abigail and Sabina had gone back to playing Frisbee with Wanda the spaniel. Kamal and Helen were keeping an eye on Nate’s salmon burgers cooking on the grill. Celer was curled up in the shade, asleep.

Sliding the screen door closed behind me, I wondered how much longer my Pompeii family would be safe.

5

After the others had left, Abigail and Sabina helped me clear up and then retired to their side of the house. I turned on the dishwasher, then sat down with a cup of coffee to check my cell phone for further communiqués from Quinn—there weren’t any—and to see if I could think of any solutions that didn’t involve running Quinn over a moonless autumn night. I could hear the muffled sound of Abigail and Sabina’s laughter through the walls now and then. I suspected that Jacob Jacobson’s tweets were being read and discussed next door. We had decided not to expose Sabina to TV just yet, but the Internet was unavoidable, especially since she had needed to use the computer for the online English as a Second Language crash course she had been taking over the summer. She was the only person in the world whose mother tongue was Latin. The thought made me sad for a moment. Like I said, her knowledge of first-century Latin and the customs of the time would have made her an invaluable research subject to historians and linguists, starting with Helen; but Helen herself had drawn a sharp line in the sand. Sabina was not to be treated as a research subject. If scholars wanted to thicken their classical Latin dictionaries, they could apply for a STEWie run like everyone else. Sabina was just a kid who had lost her family. I gritted my teeth at Quinn’s meddling.

Another peal of laughter drifted through the walls.

Jacob was a harmless crush on Sabina’s part—if anything, it made me feel better about her chances of acclimatizing to
twenty-fir
st-century life. After a leap of more than two thousand years, there were inevitably a few bumps, like frequent visits to the dentist, which thirteen years of decay, deposits, and no brushing had necessitated. Sabina didn’t enjoy that aspect of modern life one bit. A different sort of surprise to her was the fact that we weren’t going to marry her off. Back in Pompeii, Sabina’s grandmother and father had arranged for her an early marriage (by our standards) to a young pottery shop apprentice. Of course, they were all long gone now—whether in the Vesuvius eruption or later, of natural causes. We had never found out and probably never would.

I got up from the kitchen table and did a loop around my small living room, mentally dividing the furniture into items that had already been in the house when Quinn and I had moved in, after my parents had left for Florida (where they were in charge of a retirement community), and items that Quinn and I had picked out together. In this second group were the big-screen TV and the ladder shelf with books and DVDs on it. Also the wall color behind the shelf, a muted orange we’d argued over because he had wanted a more manly steel blue, which I’d felt would give the house the feel of a hospital. It was one of our many
arguments
—other times we’d grappled about my long work hours, whose turn it was to do the dishes, Quinn’s desire to move to one coast or the other, and many more domestic grievances.

Sounds of some kind of noisy activity drifted through from next door. I knew what it was. Abigail and Sabina had decided that Celer was overdue for a bath (a new element in his life) and that tonight would be the night. Celer fought baths with the only avenue available to him; that is to say, he made himself as heavy as he could and refused to budge from behind the door to the bathroom. It took two people to get him into the tub, and one to hold him down while the other washed. The bathroom floor and walls took a beating with each dreaded bath. I heard the water turn on and sounds of encouragement. I would have gone over to help, but two people and one dog was the limit for the small bathroom of the mother-and-law-suite.

So the divorce papers were on the way, or would be the next day. I tried to gauge how I felt about that, not to mention Quinn’s date at Ingrid’s Restaurant, and decided I felt perfectly fine about both things, aside from the fact that he was using the divorce papers and Sabina in a carrot-and-stick approach to get what he wanted. I wondered who he was having dinner with. Someone we had both known socially, or a new acquaintance, like the grad student he had been talking up in the courtyard of the Hypatia House? Whoever it was, it was none of my business.

I took out my laptop and flicked it to life. Perhaps needing to symbolically say goodbye to my married life, I changed the
passwords
to my social media accounts, which Quinn knew, wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner. It didn’t take long, as most of my time at the computer was spent on work, not personal matters. I was about to head off to bed when I remembered that somewhere on my computer was a photo of Quinn’s grandfather, the one with the Kensington Runestone. I hadn’t looked at it in years.

Some digging around through old files produced one that was simply saved as
Farfar’s Photo,
as if it had been the only one ever taken of the man, which was highly unlikely. I had never met Quinn’s grandfather—Magnus had died when Quinn was still a toddler, no doubt a charming and trouble-making three-y
ear-old
. I searched the mustachioed face for similarities to Quinn, but found it difficult because of how expressionless Magnus’s face was—his grandson had never
not
had a grin in photos, even our wedding ones.

Like Quinn had told me, and I had in turn told Dr. Holm, Magnus had tried his hand at various things in search of that elusive fortune before marrying and fathering a child late in life, at age fifty. He never did amass a fortune, but he established a comfortable life with Ellen Olsen, who was now also gone. They had owned a magic shop in Rochester, which Quinn remembered fondly as stocking everything from whoopee cushions to gear for more serious magicians. It didn’t bode well for Magnus Olsen’s veracity that he had become a connoisseur of the art of illusion and trickery.

Which suited me just fine. I moved the mouse to delete the photo, but something prevented me from clicking. Instead, I washed up and headed to bed.

It did make for a good tale, admittedly. A party of explorers from the unknown land of wild grapes, Vinland. I imagined the Norsemen as rugged, self-sufficient types, with mud on their boots and suntanned, wind-bitten features, driven to face the dangers of exploring what was (to them) a new land. What had sent them on their journey? Economic hardship, a Europe in the grips of the Black Death…or the desire to chisel their names into history, a personality trait that Magnus and Quinn shared, although Quinn was hardly the danger-seeking type? Whatever it was, something had gone badly wrong. Those who had lived to tell the tale had done so with stone and chisel. Six hundred years would pass before an immigrant farmer would find their
memorial
clasped in the root of a tree.

Or not. I fluffed up my pillow and turned toward the
window
, where the just risen half-moon was peeking out from under the bedroom shades. I realized that I wanted the stone to be a hoax because Quinn believed in it. But it wasn’t only that. The bottom line was that if the stone
was
real—well, it would be that much harder to send Quinn on his way.