The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (7 page)

Restaurants and shops lined Alexandria’s wide main street, Broadway; a lot of them incorporated the word
Viking
into their name or had some sort of Scandinavian motif. The Runestone Museum was at the north end of the street. We parked, grabbed a quick bite of lunch at a diner, then walked down past the museum for a closer look at Big Ole, a thirty-foot-tall Viking statue. Big Ole sported a red cape, a winged helmet, and, in one muscular fist, a spear. His shield proudly proclaimed:

ALEXANDRIA

BIRTHPLACE OF

AMERICA

“How do they figure?” Nate asked, looking up at Big Ole.

“The runestone. If it’s real, it’s the earliest record of Europeans stepping foot on future US soil.”

“But still…it wasn’t really the start of anything, America or otherwise. And there were already people living here. My people—a quarter of them, at least.”

“It’s good for tourism.”

“Besides, wasn’t the runestone found near Kensington?”

“Alexandria is the county seat.”

“Vikings, all the way here.” He shook his head.

“Actually, according to Dr. Holm, they wouldn’t have been Vikings by that time. Christianized Norse, she said.”

We waited to let a car pass, then crossed the street to the museum. Before going in, we stopped to look through the fence into the area behind the main building. There was a barn, a smokehouse for curing meat, a washhouse, and several other pioneer-era structures, whether replicas or original I wasn’t sure. We headed inside and stopped to pay the admission fee in the gift shop. The gift shop, which turned out to be a precursor of the museum itself, seemed to have a bit of everything—
Big Ol
e bobbleheads shared shelf space with teepee Christmas ornaments. There were plastic Viking helmets, as well as runestone T-shirts, runestone mugs, and runestone license plate frames. As we waited for a customer to finish paying at the cash register, I rifled through the T-shirt rack to find one for Sabina and turned to see that Nate had donned one of the plastic helmets. It was gold, with horns like elephant tusks sticking out on either side, like he had a big
U
on his head. It looked ridiculous on him.

“Well, what do you think?”

“They didn’t really wear them, you know,” I said, suppressing laughter. “Dr. Holm told me that.”

“Really? I’m crushed. I think I’ll buy it as a souvenir anyway.”

“Should we tell them?” I nodded toward the cash register, where a museum staffer was ringing up a purchase.

“I expect they’ll find out soon enough.”

We bought the helmet along with the T-shirt for Sabina and headed into the main display area. The small museum was nearly empty, and most of the guests were families with small children in tow.

Propped up on a stand inside a protective glass case, the runestone held the spot of honor. Around it, wall panels explained the meaning of the runes and the history of the stone. Off to the side were more display rooms with exhibits on pioneer and Native American life.

My first impression was that the runestone seemed small, smaller than I had expected from the poster in the Coffey Library and the picture of Quinn’s grandfather with it. About the size and shape of a tombstone, it was dark gray, except for the lower left corner, where there was a triangle of lighter gray. A nearby panel noted that the stone weighed just over two
hundred
pounds.

My second impression, possibly influenced by all the kitsch we had just seen in the gift shop, was one that immediately made me relax:
It’s fake
.

Because these were not runes carved in a hurry; they couldn’t have been. Steady hands had worked neatly and painstakingly—stick-like symbols followed one another in careful row after row, nine rows in all, covering well over half of the face of the stone. As if the carver had decided to give up and switch surfaces upon reaching the light-gray and rougher bottom third of the stone, the text continued on one side. The three additional rows of runes were there, and, near one edge, someone had chiseled an
H
. I was pleased to see that the modern letter didn’t look any different from the runes themselves—that is to say, neither the runes nor the
H
seemed very old at all.

“Which part is the date?” Nate asked, consulting some of the support materials on the walls.

“Here.” I pointed. “The symbol that looks like half a T, that’s the number one. The one that looks like an F is the number two, and so on. The six has that funny loop.”

We circled to the other side of the glass cabinet, where a detail on the back of the stone caught our attention. Parallel scratches ran down the uncarved side, as if the stone had been dragged across something sharp.

Nate explained that it must have been the other way around. “I’ve seen those before. Glacial markings. They’re from when the stone was part of the bedrock and a glacier passed on top of it, dragging rocks with it. Those tracks were made before the stone itself was dislodged and moved by the glacier.”

At an angle across the back of the stone were two wavy lines, newer and sharper looking, thin and white, with one continuing down the side of the stone. The roots of the aspen, tracing out a path as the tree grew over the stone? I didn’t like it. It matched Olof Ohman’s account.

“Looks like the tree roots left a mark. How old was the tree when it was cut down?” Nate asked.

I remembered that from my reading. “A decade or two seemed to be the consensus.”

“Doesn’t that put Olof Ohman in the clear? He had bought the land, what, only a few years previously?”

“I suppose.”

“Really, Julia, I’m beginning to think you have a personal stake in this stone being proven fake. I would have thought, having Scandinavian roots and all, you’d want it to be real.”

“It just seems to me that it’s quite possible that the stone spent time underground before Olof Ohman found it, carved it, and reburied it.”

“Yes, but that’s not the simplest explanation, is it?”

I sighed. “No, I suppose not. Occam’s razor.”

“What’s that?”

“A creed everyone in the science departments lives by—
Don’t complicate matters. The simple solution is probably the right one
. Occam was a medieval English philosopher,” I added. “The razor part of it has to do with ‘shaving away’ unneeded assumptions.”

Nate nodded thoughtfully.

“Well?” I demanded.

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of the stone. Is it real?”

“Like your Occam and his razor say, the stone is probably what it says it is.”

It wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. “Let’s go see the place where it was found,” I suggested, hoping we’d see something there that would definitively damn the stone.

A fifteen-minute drive took us over the highway and to the old Ohman homestead, which was now part of Kensington Runestone Park. The county park, wooded and serene, lay in the middle of gently rolling countryside dotted with lakes and cabins. Nate pulled the Jeep to a stop in a small parking lot. We seemed to be the only visitors.

We peeked into the windows of the old Ohman house, which was white with a brown roof, but didn’t go inside because both doors were padlocked. Nearby stood the old Kensington train depot building, which had been moved into the park from its original location. Next, we dodged some bees and ducked into the dairy barn. Big and red, it housed an indoor picnic area. Copies of plat maps lined the walls and there was a replica of the runestone just outside. After exploring the areas around the house, we left the car and walked up the road to the small hill where the runestone had been found.

Though not exceptionally high even by Minnesota standards, Runestone Hill had a 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. Beyond it lay a large marshy lake, and, on the opposite side, there was a small teardrop-shaped pond. At the top stood a monument, with a bench and four flags—for the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Minnesota. Nate bent down to look at the monument and I suddenly realized how quiet it was, other than the chirping birds and the occasional car in the distance. Highway 94 wasn’t visible from where we were, but I knew it was there, cutting across the land in a southeast to northwest line from the Twin Cities to Fargo, North Dakota. Only a few of the cars streaming in both directions would make a stop here. This area, scenic as it was, was home to only a few; for most, it was just a place to drive through. A term popped into my head that I had heard chemistry and engineering professors use on occasion to describe a bit of research or an experiment—
steady state
. Other than the change brought upon by the seasons, this was not a place of flux and motion. A new lakeside cabin might be built or a different billboard erected on the side of the highway, but that was about it. This was a place set in its serene ways.

Which was all well and good but perfectly useless in helping me decide what to do about Quinn.

Nate and I took a few photos of the hilltop monument and left, no wiser for our visit.

Nate’s phone beeped with a text message on the way back—it was Officer Van Underberg reporting that eleven student bikes had been stolen that afternoon. Since the girls weren’t expecting me yet, and I wanted to figure out who had carved the modern
H
on the runestone, Nate dropped me off at the library before continuing on to the campus security office, which was lucky as we spotted the missing bikes arranged in an artistic metal-and-rubber sculpture in the library courtyard. Apart from the cut locks, it didn’t look like any of them had been damaged, only lovingly and gravity-defyingly woven into a pyramid. Just an early-in-the-semester student prank.

Nate waved off my offer of help and started untangling the bikes as I continued up the wide steps of the library. Scott, looking a bit surprised to see me again so soon, waved cheerfully as I walked past his desk. I needed to get over the feeling that I didn’t belong here.

I carried my books to an armchair by one of the tall library windows, passing a table with four sleep-deprived students slumped in chairs. I wondered if they had been responsible for stacking the bikes, but they all had scripts in front of them, like they were practicing lines for a play. I left them to it, and,
making
myself comfortable in the armchair, started where I had left off, which was with the stone being stored up in Olof Ohman’s shed.

The runestone might have stayed there but for a young graduate student from the University of Wisconsin by the name of Hjalmar Holand. I guessed that he, like many a grad student, needed a research topic, and the runestone captured his excitement and energy. Olof Ohman gave the young scholar the stone, and Holand became its biggest fan, taking it to Europe, writing books about it, and weaving a somewhat unlikely story that its carvers were soldier-missionaries sent by the King of Norway and Sweden who had ventured beyond their intended destination of Greenland. In an era in which artifacts weren’t treated as carefully as they were nowadays, he was the one who had carved the
H
on the side of the stone—the equivalent of someone carving their initials into a favorite tree.

The play-reading students in the corner raised their voices for a moment and received a stern look from Scott, which resulted in giggles and a torrent of whispers. I wondered how the detangling of the bicycle practical joke was proceeding outside.