The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 by Neve Maslakovic
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477849507
ISBN-10: 1477849505
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013945539
for my mother
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE STONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
PART TWO: KNEE-DEEP
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
PART THREE: IN THE FUNNEL
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
PART FOUR: HOME
38
39
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
It started with a knock on my office door—and ended with us carrying a dead body back from the fourteenth century.
Scratch that. The story actually starts much earlier, a year before I began working at St. Sunniva University, before the school even had a functional time travel lab. I was still working at the local gym when a new member walked in. He was tall, blond, dressed in white from head to toe, and had a tennis racket swung jauntily over one shoulder.
I was expecting the standard pick-up line, but when he slid his crisp new membership pass toward me, flashing a toothy grin, he said, “Ever heard of the Kensington Runestone?”
Good looking and an interesting conversationalist.
I took the card. “Yes, it’s supposed to be a fake, right? Rigged to look like it was carved by Vikings who came here years before Columbus.”
Here was the middle of Minnesota’s glacial lakes and hills country. More precisely, Kensington, a couple of towns over from Thornberg.
“Oh, it’s not a hoax,” he said confidently. “My grandfather watched it come out of the ground. His name was Magnus Olsen—I’m Quinn Olsen, by the way.” He extended a hand and shook mine with a firm grip.
“Olsen?” I said, looking down at his membership card.
“Yeah, why?”
“I’m an Olsen, too. Julia.”
“Very pleased to meet you, Julia Olsen. Hmm, I hope we’re not related. That could be a problem.” There was that charming grin again.
I pushed the gym card back toward him. “Plenty of Olsens in town. Mine are from Norway.”
“Good, because mine are from Denmark. I guess it just means we both have an ancestor who was the son of an Ole.”
It almost seemed like we were fated to be together, I remember thinking.
I was a lot younger then.
That night, over lingonberry pancakes and wine at Ingrid’s, which is what passes for a fancy restaurant in Thornberg, Quinn told me his grandfather’s story. Farfar, he called him—father’s father. “Here, you want to see a photo of Farfar with the stone, Jules? Is it all right if I call you Jules?”
He had the photo in his wallet. At the time, I thought it was sweet. Perhaps it was. I should have realized back then that it was an obsession for him. He passed the photo to me over the lit candle in the middle of the table. The black-and-white square showed a middle-aged man in a suit standing stiffly, as if at attention, next to a rectangular gray stone propped up on a couple of wooden boxes. On the back of the photo someone had written in careful cursive, Magnus Olsen and the Kensington Runestone, 1928.
“What are those squiggles on the stone?” I asked.
“Runes. You know, the alphabet used for old English and Norse before we developed our A to Zs.”
“And your grandfather found it under a tree?”
“One of his neighbors did. He helped. He was just eight at the time.”
“He looks so serious,” I said, handing the photo back. “I wonder when people decided it was okay to smile in photos.”
“Maybe when their teeth stopped looking so yellow. More butter?”
“Thanks.”
“But that’s not the only reason he looks so serious. No one believed him or the farmer who found the stone. Magnus was accused of being a liar and even lost a job over it. After that, he became a bit of a nomad, earning money by trying his hand at various odd jobs and schemes. I’m happy to report that he did eventually settle down, after he met Farmor. One day— yes, I don’t mind saying it—one day I intend to prove that he told the truth. That the stone was carved in 1362 by Vikings. Most people have never heard of the runestone. I intend to change that.”
Quinn moved in five months later, and, a couple of years down the road, we were married on a San Diego beach at sunrise.
Fast-forward six years or so to a Friday morning.
I was now working as assistant to the dean of sciences at St. Sunniva University. My small office was two buildings over from the balloon-roofed Time Travel Engineering (TTE) building, where our historical researchers stepped into a maze of mirrors and lasers to hop into the past and return with invaluable photos and notes. The plants on the lone windowsill of my office had just gotten their weekly watering from Oscar, the security guard from the TTE building. I appreciated the interest he took in my plants, and I’m sure they did, too, given my notorious black thumb. The door had just closed behind him when it opened again with a peppy knock.
I thought Oscar might have forgotten his watering can and automatically glanced around for it, but it wasn’t his wiry figure standing in the doorway.
It was Quinn. We hadn’t seen each other in what was for him a calendar year and a bit less for me, given the time skip that had occurred on the way back from my one and only run into the past, a stumble into ancient Pompeii. He was sporting a tan, an expensive haircut, and a large yellow umbrella with frogs on it. The umbrella was still dripping from the September rain tapping out a beat on my window. He threw a look around my office and said, “So, Jules, where do you keep it? The Time Machine?” as if he expected to see it nestled in a corner nook.
I set aside the incoming student orientation booklet I’d been working on while chatting with Oscar. I knew why Quinn had come back to town, and I was not happy to see him.
“It’s out of the question, Quinn. You can’t just waltz into the TTE lab and expect to go on a run into the fourteenth century.” I had already told him this back in June when he had called from Phoenix. Since the rest of the summer had passed without another word from him, I had assumed that Quinn had moved on to his next grand scheme, whatever that was. The last I’d heard he was flipping hou
ses. But now here he was, on my office doorstep.
Or more precisely, in the chair across the desk from me. He shook the frog umbrella, sending raindrops cascading onto my rug, and hooked it on the chair back. He flashed a familiar grin at me. “But you’re in charge of the Time Machine, aren’t you, Jules?”
“Hardly. I only oversee the roster. You know that. Dean Braga reviews all time travel proposals and approves or rejects them at her discretion. And don’t call it the Time Machine,” I added. “Its name is STEWie.”
STEWie was short for SpaceTimE Warper, and I was pretty sure I had mentioned this to him more than once in the months before he had taken off for Arizona with one of our campus security officers. Speaking of which—
“How’s Officer Jones?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know. She’s moved on.”
“Sorry. Did you bring the divorce papers—signed, I hope? You did get them in the mail, didn’t you? My lawyer hasn’t been able to reach you on the phone.”
“I don’t have them with me. Never mind that. Let’s talk about the runestone, Jules.”
I noticed he didn’t actually say whether he had signed the papers or not.
“Not that again. The runestone is just a hoax.”
“I disagree.”
“A prank that got out of hand, an example of pioneer-era humor, a bit of fun by Scandinavians proud of their heritage—”
“I believe Farfar’s story.”
“If you’re so sure your grandfather was right, what do you need me—and STEWie—for?”
“To prove it…and film it. It’s going to make a fantastic pilot for a reality TV series. Look, it’ll be simple enough.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “We jump to 1362 to shoot the Vikings carving the stone—wait, let’s make a stop first in 1898 to film Farfar dig it up—or is it better to do it the other way around, 1362 first and then 1898, the way history intended? Either way is fine with me. Do you want to turn to a fresh page and start a list of the things we’ll need?” He nodded at the notepad on my desk, where I had jotted down a few notes about the grad student orientation booklet. “And,” he added, “shouldn’t you be offering me a cookie or something?”
He knew from experience that I tackled all problems by (a) offering food and (b) making a list of what needed to be done.
“You want a list?” I said, sliding the cookie jar toward him. He lifted up the lid and cheerfully took out a couple of the fudge mints as I ticked off the points on my fingers. “Here it is. To go on a STEWie run, you need to (a) be a professor, postdoc, or grad student in one of the departments here at St. Sunniva; (b) submit a research proposal for approval by Dean Braga and the TTE department, a process which typically takes a month or more; (c) secure a roster spot, which takes a few more months; and—probably most importantly—(d) have funding. STEWie runs are expensive.
“And more to the point,” I added, “Dean Braga would never sign off on your plan because STEWie cannot be used for personal matters. You have to be a historian looking to answer a research question. Or, failing that, an archeologist, anthropologist, paleontologist, linguist, geologist, or evolutionary biologist.”
“You went on a run. And you’re none of those things.” He popped a third fudge mint into his mouth.
“I’m just a science dean’s assistant, yes. But Pompeii was a special case.” He hadn’t meant it as a put-down, I knew. He honestly had trouble understanding how someone could stand, much less enjoy, a nine-to-five desk job (or, in my case, more like seven-thirty to seven).
“How’s the luxury-home-flipping business?” I asked.
“I have a couple of properties in play.”
I got to my feet. “Then I suggest you use your time to renovate them instead of wasting it trying to prove that the Kensington Runestone is real and that your grandfather told the truth. There is nothing you can say that would make me want to help you in the present, much less the past.”
“I have proof that you brought the Pompeii girl back.”
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.”
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 1