The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  “You’re Quinn Olsen’s wife, right?”

  “I am,” I admitted. “Look, I don’t know what he told you—”

  “That there’s a family legend concerning his grandfather and the Kensington Runestone.” She took a long sip through a straw that was the same pink color as her strawberry smoothie, then went on. “I told him the runestone is real, of course—it’s a two-hundred-pound slab of graywacke inscribed with rows of runes and you can drive half an hour to Alexandria to see it.”

  This, of course, was not the Alexandria in Egypt, but the biggest town in the county and its seat.

  “The real question is, who carved it?” She paused for another sip of the smoothie. “Norse explorers who sailed to North America more than a century before Columbus and reached as far inland as the Great Lakes, like the text on the runestone claims? Or a nineteenth-century Swedish immigrant with a talent for hoaxes?”

  “You sound as if you think there’s a chance the runestone is authentic,” I said, pulling the paper wrapping off my straw. This was no good. She was supposed to discourage Quinn, not add fuel to his latest wild scheme. “That it was carved by Vikings.”

  She shook her head. “It wouldn’t have been the Vikings. The Viking Age—of raiders, Thor-worshipers, and masters of sea and river travel—ended in the eleventh century. The medieval Norse were traders who had converted to Christianity.” She paused for more smoothie, then said in a measured tone, “The stone is almost certainly a hoax.”

  “Almost certainly? You didn’t tell Quinn that, did you? He’s perfectly capable of taking that as an encouragement.”

  “Well, to be honest, he didn’t seem discouraged in the least by what I had to say.” She paused for another long sip, then said, “I’m somewhat familiar with the details of the runestone finding. I don’t remember any mention of a Magnus Olsen, though I thought it would be rude to mention that.”

  “He was just a neighborhood kid, eight years old.” As I related the tale, it suddenly occurred to me how much alike Quinn and his grandfather were. Perhaps the runestone hadn’t been as influential on Magnus Olsen’s life as family lore had it. Maybe it was in the genes, this dislike of being tied down to a steady job that paid the bills. Whatever it was, Quinn certainly had it. Before the flipping-houses-in-Phoenix thing, Quinn had invested our savings in a restaurant that failed immediately, started several blogs that never went anywhere and didn’t bring in any money, and even suggested we move to Hawaii to open a snorkeling business, something neither of us knew a thing about. Though I didn’t obsess over it—the end of our relationship had been a long time coming—I had always wondered if I’d said or done something to finally make him leave. Now I realized that it didn’t matter. In the end, it didn’t have much to do with me, after all; it had everything to do with his quest to make his mark on the world.

  Dr. Holm had downed her drink before the edges in the ice cubes in mine had the chance to round. She took a loud slurp of what was left in the bottom of her cup and said, “It’s sweet that your…that Mr. Olsen wants to clear his grandfather’s name.” I didn’t think so, especially given that he had resorted to blackmail. And Quinn was probably just as motivated by the thought of getting his face on TV as anything else. He certainly seemed to have exercised his charms on Dr. Holm, I noted.

  She added, “I’ll pass on what I told him. I tried…I wrote up a STEWie proposal to investigate the runestone last year. Dr. Payne said no. In his opinion, runic linguists should stick to European sites and go no farther west than Greenland, which the Vikings reached in 982.”

  I realized why her name was unfamiliar. I had never seen it on the STEWie roster. She hadn’t been on a run yet. The Dr. Payne she had mentioned was a senior professor of American history. Several of his research proposals, all written densely and with elevated prose, had crossed my desk on their way to the science dean’s office. They were usually approved, unless there was some technical reason prohibiting the run. I had seen the thin-haired, stooped professor in period costume—coat, waistcoat, and knee-length breeches—around the Time Travel Engineering building. Rumor had it that those Toliver Payne mentored—his postdocs and grad students—had a hard time getting the professor to sign off on projects that had not originated in his own brain.

  Dr. Holm confirmed as much. “In the two years I’ve been a postdoc here at St. Sunniva University, I’ve written forty-nine proposals for projects I thought would make good research topics. I’ve managed to obtain funding for only three—three!—and none for a STEWie run. Since Dr. Payne had mentioned Greenland, I got the idea to study the Kingittorsuaq Runestone, which was found north of the two Viking settlements there, and establish a full translation and date of carving for it.” As before, her words, those of an authoritative researcher, sounded odd when coupled with her high-pitched voice. Not that a personal characteristic of that sort should have much bearing on the prospect of a professorial position down the road—at least, not in an ideal world. What makes someone a good teacher is his or her ability to connect with students and get the best out of them, not his or her method of delivery.

  “Unfortunately,” she sighed, “Greenland turned out to be a kind of a no-man’s land academically speaking—no one can decide if it belongs in American history, Dr. Payne’s domain, or European history, Dr. May’s domain. Dr. Payne told me to submit to Dr. May, and Dr. May told me to submit to Dr. Payne.”

  I was familiar with her complaint. Getting funding in academia was no easy matter, and securing a STEWie roster spot was an order of magnitude harder. Tenured professors enjoyed priority and were the most frequent visitors to the cavernous lab with its maze of mirrors and lasers. Postdoctoral researchers like Dr. Holm occupied the gray area between graduate student and junior professor. Postdocs were relatively cheap, highly trained, and worked long hours without any guarantee of a professorship down the road. It often took three or four postings—usually at different research centers around the country and abroad, each lasting only a year or two and requiring uprooting and relocation each time—before a tenure-track faculty position was offered, if the person was lucky. I decided to try and give Dr. Holm what little help I could, which amounted to no more than putting her STEWie proposals in front of Dean Braga when she was in a good mood and not at the end of the day, when she was rushing to get things done. I owed Dr. Holm that much at least for trying to talk Quinn out of his plan.

  As if echoing my thoughts, she commented with a self-conscious laugh, “I’d bribe Dean Braga or treat her to dinner or something if I thought that would get me a run. She always looks so severe, though, that I barely dare to say hello to her. Uh—I don’t suppose you have any influence over who gets chosen for runs, do you?”

  “Not much, no. Sorry.”

  She tugged at the hairband. “What was it like?”

  “Which?”

  “Going to Pompeii. Other than the danger presented by the volcano, obviously, and being marooned against your will.”

  “It was…extraordinary. I’m sure you’ll get your chance,” I said.

  “I know, good things come to those who wait and all that.” She got to her feet. “Did you want to see it, your runestone? There is an excellent life-size reproduction in the map section of the library.”

  A couple of minutes later, our drink cups dispensed with, Dr. Holm led me to the lower level of the library and a large glass cabinet. This was where historical maps and manuscripts obtained on STEWie runs and through more conventional means were made available to students and other library visitors in a sort of disorganized, overflowing fashion. She rummaged around a bit and finally pulled out a rolled-up poster from the back of a low shelf. I followed her to a free table, and when she unrolled the poster, I helped her pin down its corners with four library books that had been discarded by previous patrons.

  Perched on the table next to the poster, her tone and the T-shirt with the Viking ships making her s
eem like a perky museum guide, she said, “Farmer Olof Ohman was the one who found the stone. He was clearing a new field on his homestead with the help of his two sons. One of them noticed the stone clasped in the roots of a tree they had just uprooted. This is what they said they found.”

  The poster displayed the front of the stone:

  There was also a view of one side, where a shorter bit of text had been carved:

  “Can you read it?” I asked Dr. Holm, looking up at her from my chair.

  “The runes? Oh, yes, though there are differing opinions about the translation. I’ll give you the gist of it, though.” Running a finger over the poster, she quoted:

  Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Northmen on a journey from Vinland to the west.

  We had a camp one day’s journey north from this stone.

  We were out fishing one day.

  After we came home,

  We found ten men red from blood and dead.

  Ave Maria save us from evil.

  I followed her hand as it moved over the text and spotted the abbreviation that stood for Ave Maria, as that part was chiseled in clearly recognizable letters: AVM.

  “Gotlanders?” I asked, vowing to study up on my Scandinavian history. I had picked up bits and pieces from the historical snippets that accompanied each STEWie run proposal, but I hadn’t come across Gotland before.

  “It’s the largest island in the Baltic Sea. Part of Sweden today. And Northmen probably refers to Norwegians. Hypothetically speaking, we can imagine they might have been explorers looking to establish a new trade route, perhaps for fur, which was a luxury item at the time.” She added, “Here on the side, it says: Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.”

  “It’s quite a tale,” I said, “if it’s true. On a journey from Vinland…I’ve heard that term before—it’s used in the Norse sagas, right? But where was it?”

  “No one is quite sure.” She tugged at her hairband again. “All we know is that there was a settlement at Lancey Meadows—”

  “I’m sorry, where?”

  She spelled it out for me. “L’Anse aux Meadows. The settlement was built just around the turn of the millennium—early eleventh century—on Newfoundland.”

  “Sorry,” I said again, “my geography of the, er, northern part of the Americas is rusty.”

  “Newfoundland is the large island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of mainland Canada. Twenty years after his father, Erik the Red, founded the Greenland colonies, Leif Erikson sailed to Newfoundland—or at least we think he did. It hasn’t been confirmed yet with a run. The settlement, with its Viking artifacts, is at the northernmost tip of the island. It is the only confirmed Norse site in North America.” She followed the statement with a moment’s pause to underline its significance.

  The implication suddenly hit me.

  “Wait,” I said. “If there was a Viking village in Canada, doesn’t that conclusively prove that—”

  “—the Vikings reached the Americas five hundred years before Columbus? It does indeed. Before L’Anse aux Meadows no one had believed it.”

  Thanks to a recent run by the Dr. May she had mentioned, we now had a snapshot of Columbus. The picture showed a man on the tall side with a hooked nose, his red beard and hair shot through with white. It surprised me that I hadn’t heard that a Viking archeological site had been found. My Norwegian ancestry meant there was a high possibility that I had Viking blood in my veins, though I didn’t actually know of any ancestors who had gone pirating, pillaging, and exploring. My parents were not big on ancestry and that kind of thing—except for a few family photos, the knickknacks in our house were mostly mementos of the stories my parents had written for the town newspaper over the years. But you couldn’t grow up in Minnesota, where it was impossible to swing a cat without hitting someone of Scandinavian descent, without absorbing some Viking lore.

  “When was the settlement documented?” I asked, expecting to hear that it had been filmed on a STEWie run while I was in Pompeii. “Lancey…what did you call it again?” It occurred to me that I should have brought my notepad, if only to list all the new names I was learning.

  “L’Anse aux Meadows. The name is an anglicized version of the French for Jellyfish Cove. The settlement—what was left of it—was found in 1960 by the Norwegian explorer and archeologist pair Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. I thought it was worth a shot for a STEWie run. No luck so far, though,” she said. I thought she meant no luck in confirming that it was the Vinland of the runestone and the Norse sagas, but she elaborated by lowering her voice to quote Dr. Payne. “ ‘There is no need for you to go, Dr. Holm, where there are no runes.’ ”

  I took another look at the poster, this time with different eyes. “So if the Vikings reached L’Anse aux Meadows at just about the turn of the millennium—”

  “—could a small group have made it inland all the way to Kensington some three hundred fifty years later?” She continued with the caution of an academic. “There are linguistic problems with the runes on the stone that point to a forgery. I explained that to Quinn—to Mr. Olsen. I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “Not in the least. Thank you, Dr. Holm.”

  As she rolled up the poster and turned back to the cabinet, I stopped her. “Why did you want to go to L’Anse aux Meadows if there are no runes there?”

  I recognized the hesitation. She didn’t want to share an idea that she hadn’t published yet. “Well—think of all we would learn about the Old Norse language if we planted microphones throughout the settlement. It’s true that most of the conversation would concern ordinary things like What’s for dinner? and I hope the rain will taper off by tomorrow. But that’s exactly what we need to supplement the meager texts that have survived. It’s unlikely that L’Anse aux Meadows itself was Vinland, the place of wild grapes, but if we should happen to overhear the villagers mention where it might be…” She didn’t finish the thought.

  The rolled-up poster in her hand, with its black-and-white reproduction of the runestone, was like a window into the past. I raised an eyebrow at it. “What killed them?”

  “Who?”

  “The ones who stayed behind at the camp on the runestone. Unfriendly locals?”

  “Hypothetically speaking, that’s been the assumption ever since the stone was found. If we knew where to look, perhaps we could find the skeletons of ten men and their effects within a day’s journey on foot or boat from Kensington. Now that would be something… Just think of it—they probably thought they had reached Asia from the west, just as Columbus would assume years later.”

  For someone who didn’t believe in the authenticity of the stone, she sure seemed to know a lot about it. As if she could sense what I was thinking, she added, “Still hypothetically speaking, of course. Some of the runes are unusual, like this part here, opthagelsefarth.” She unrolled the poster a bit again. “Did the carver mean to suggest a journey of acquisition or a journey of exploration? And the camp where the fisherman left their companions is described as being near two landmarks. In my opinion, the word refers to—”

  “Wasting your time, Dr. Holm?” a voice rasped. “Don’t you have a department meeting to attend? Or were you not planning to grace us with your presence?”

  It was Dr. Payne, a bound book in one hand, his thinning hair combed over an ever-expanding bald spot. The raspiness of his voice was from years of chain smoking in the courtyard of the American History building.

  “I’ll be at the meeting, Dr. Payne, I was just showing Julia here the runestone poster—she’s from the science departments. Even though the stone’s not authentic, it’s still a valuable nineteenth-century artifact…”

  “I expressed an interest,” I explained calmly. “There is a minor connection on my husband’s side of the family.”

  The profess
or sent a look of contempt in the direction of the poster in Dr. Holm’s hand. “All this talk of who discovered America—Columbus or the Vikings—is utter nonsense. Ancestral Indians got here fifteen thousand years ago, or more, by crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia. Columbus didn’t discover America. Indians discovered Europeans on their shores, much to their detriment. A hoax like the Kensington Runestone…well, let’s just say that it only makes a historian’s lot harder.”

  He sniffed derisively and went on his way.

  4

  Sabina came home on the school bus and cheerfully dropped her backpack onto the deck, where Abigail and I were setting things up for her party. Truth be told, I was happy the pair had moved in with me. While I didn’t exactly miss Quinn, the house had seemed empty when I was the only one living there. Sabina greeted me as Aunt Julia, which was nice, even though it made me feel older than my thirty-five years.

  Sabina and Abigail went to dig up a Frisbee in the garage. Helen had phoned to say she was running late, but Nate and Kamal arrived a few minutes after the appointed time in our security chief’s Jeep. They had Wanda, Nate’s spaniel, in tow. She ran off into the yard and Kamal sank into one of the deck chairs immediately, already sweating. Nate nodded at me and said, “Where do you want these, Julia?”

  He was carrying a large plate heavy with vegetables, with a stack of metal skewers waiting for them. There were also some plump, pink disks.

  I eyed them. “What on earth are those?”

  “Salmon burgers.”

  “Salmon? I thought you were bringing normal burgers.”

  “These are normal. You’ve never had a salmon burger?”

  My palate was more of the “grilled meat and potato chips” type, except, oddly, for finger foods—since they were the life’s blood of the fundraisers and other school events I frequently organized, I was well versed in fancy cheeses, fondues, shrimp cocktails, and other delicacies that could be eaten standing up. Well-versed in ordering them, that is, not making or enjoying them.