The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  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.

  I was amused to read about a much more elabor
ate prank that had been pulled by a group of grad students from one of our nearby academic competitors, the University of Minnesota, which involved a runestone. In 1985, the students had headed to the hill Nate and I had just returned from, armed with a hammer, a chisel, and a copy of the runic alphabet. Runestone Hill turned out to be “too public” for their purposes, so they headed to a nearby one instead. During this stage of the proceedings, one of them managed to get caught in a barbed wire fence and needed to get a tetanus shot later. After selecting a boulder, they started chiseling it. Finding the process more difficult than they’d imagined, they wrapped things up after carving AVM, one runic word, and the supposed date (1363), after which they tried to turn the boulder over so that the inscription faced downward. They weren’t able budge it. When the stone was found sixteen years later, I read, there was some excitement, but two of the former grad students, now university professors, confessed. All of which went to show two things—it was both easy and hard to pull off a good hoax.

  Pulling out my yellow legal pad, I drew a vertical line down the middle of the page and, in what I hoped was a scholarly fashion, penned Pros on top of one column and Cons on the other. It was time to see if the evidence weighed more heavily on one side. I did the pros first to get them out of the way and ended up with six items:

  Olof Ohman, unlikely hoaxer. The immigrant farmer, father of nine, never had any run-ins with the law and never tried to make money off the stone.

  The Norse. They built a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows at the turn of the millennium, so surely it was plausible, perhaps even likely, that their descendants had ventured farther inland over the next four hundred years.

  The length of the inscription. Two-hundred-some runes. As far as hoaxes went, it was an unnecessarily elaborate one, requiring days of carving. Something shorter—say, Ole and his buddies from Vinland were here—would have been easier to carve in the privacy of a barn and might have been more convincing to historians and linguists. Why go to the effort of crafting what was essentially a tale complete with protagonists, action, and an enemy?

  The stone itself. Geologically sound, with tree roots traced into it.

  History. If there was one thing that had come out of the STEWie program, it was the realization that History was rarely neat and tidy. A stone that didn’t make much sense at first glance might actually do so.

  Finally, and somewhat personally, there was Magnus Olsen’s account, which corroborated Olof Ohman’s. Was it really fair to blame Magnus for the way his grandson turned out?

  I did the cons next, taking my time with them:

  Olof Ohman, likely hoaxer. The elephant in the room: What were the chances that an immigrant of Scandinavian descent would find an artifact of Scandinavian origin?

  Where were the other artifacts? Finding the skeletons of ten men of European ancestry or their campsite would have helped matters greatly.

  The inscription. The stone’s very appearance, with its neatly carved rows, felt modern. The length of it must have required several days of carving, surely unlikely under the purported circumstances. The men’s comrades had just died a sudden, violent death. Why linger in the vicinity?

  The stone itself. Unusual, so out of place, mysteriously under a tree.

  Minnesota, in the middle of the country. Venturing inland from Vinland, other than rhyming quite nicely, would have required a light boat, portages, and a lot of luck and drive. It would have been no small undertaking, even for a crew of hardy Norsemen.

  And, finally:

  Magnus Olsen was related to Quinn, and Quinn had been known to stretch the truth on more than one occasion when it suited him.

  I stared at the list for a moment. Well, it was maddeningly even. How did historians cope before STEWie? It was no wonder Dean Braga was besieged with requests for roster spots. Depending on how you looked at it, the stone and its runes either exhibited unique characteristics or tell-tale signs of fraud. I tried reading the arguments from the linguists, but all I could gather was that some of the runes were too modern. I decided that the thing to do would be to talk to Dr. Holm a second time. She herself had mentioned that there were issues with the runes. I was pinning my hopes on that.

  Consulting her would have to wait until work hours on Monday, however. I’d done what I could for now. Besides, there was apple pie to be made. I folded my list of pros and cons into my bag and went outside to wait for Abigail and Sabina. They were on their way back from the orchard with Celer, Wanda, and a basket of apples, and were swinging by to pick me up. Boy, did I have a story to tell them, and it didn’t involve the runestone.

  Nate had invited me to dinner.

  8

  Monday brought a pile of paperwork. I found time to send a text message to Dr. Holm asking if she could meet with me at her earliest convenience, then rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Just before noon, when the stack of information packets for prospective students had reached an impressive height on my desk, I checked my phone—no reply from Dr. Holm yet—then grabbed a sandwich I’d brought from home and a can of pop from the vending machine and headed out to the lake. After dodging a couple of bicycles, I settled myself on my usual bench and dug into the sandwich and tried to enjoy the view. Ducks bobbed on the surface of Sunniva Lake, sending ripples through the buildings, trees, and fluffy clouds reflected in the water. Students milled to and from classes on bikes, skateboards, and occasionally on foot. I kept an eye out for Quinn, expecting him to appear any minute, Sabina’s photo in one hand and a video camera in the other at the ready for the STEWie run he imagined I was going to take him on.

  As the noon hour struck on the clock tower by the Coffey Library, the throng of students thickened and I spotted a familiar face. Not Quinn, but Sabina’s crush, Jacob Jacobson, on his way to the Time Travel Engineering building, where he had a desk in the grad student office. The hood of his sweatshirt hid his ginger hair as he propelled himself on his skateboard, weighed down by a heavy backpack. His attention was wholly engrossed by the cell phone in his hand as he weaved around the slower walkers. I hoped he wouldn’t run into anyone.

  Seeing Jacob reminded me that I had meant to check on Kamal’s presentation for his thesis defense. Deciding that the rest of the information packets could wait—the mail didn’t go out until four o’clock anyway—I headed after Jacob. If Quinn dropped by, he wouldn’t find me at my desk, which was undoubtedly for the best.

  I exchanged a few words with Oscar, who was at his post just inside the door to the TTE building, then headed to the graduate student office. Kamal was feverishly pacing around his desk. Clean-shaven, with freshly trimmed hair, he had on a slightly wrinkled gray suit and a tie dotted with mathematical symbols. He looked pale, like he was about to throw up. This was normal. All graduate students looked that way just before their dissertation defense. Kamal’s was set for three o’clock, so he had a good two and a half hours to get through.

  “Where is everyone else?” I asked, looking around at the empty desks. “I thought I saw Jacob heading over.”

  “He dropped off his backpack and then went to help Abigail prepare for her run with Dr. B. Well, not exactly help—more like Abigail’s helping him learn the ropes. Now that Jacob’s been here for a year, he really needs to pick a research topic and start going on STEWie runs. The department doesn’t like grad students hanging around without engaging in active research.” After this very mature sounding statement, Kamal added, “And everyone else went to lunch. I didn’t want to risk food stains on my suit. Besides, I’m not really hungry.”

  “You should eat something. We don’t want you fainting during your defense.”

  “I might if someone asks me a question I don’t know how to answer.”

  “It’ll be fine.” I spotted a box of granola bars on Abigail’s desk and pushed one in his direction. “Here, eat this while I look over your presentation.”

  He tur
ned his laptop toward me. “Don’t tell me if you find a spelling mistake, Julia. Wait, no, tell me—I still have time to fix things.”

  He took the granola bar, dropped into a chair, and started munching, contorting unnaturally to avoid getting crumbs on his suit.

  I quickly looked over his slides—the ones featuring Neanderthal and early human coupling, while not exactly tasteful, weren’t any worse than others I’d seen in biology or medical sciences presentations. Most of the photos had been taken from afar, with a long-focus lens. Kamal had also included a few photos that showed just the prehistoric landscape, unspoiled by electrical wires or roads. The meat of the presentation was the computational method he had used to find safe landing zones, culminating with a 3-D map of the zones in Neander Valley and nearby locations, with time as one of the coordinates. There were also red dots on the map—ghost zones, like the one in Pompeii where he and I had almost perished. Ghost zones were wells in time you did not want to fall into.

  I looked up from the last slide, the one titled Acknowledgements. Kamal had moved onto his second granola bar. He was lost in thought, and I had to ask my question twice. “Dr. Payne is on your committee?”

  “Yeah.” He swallowed quickly. “I needed someone from outside the department. Why, have you heard anything I should know about? He’s not extra tough on students, is he?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Dr. Mooney and Dr. Little have followed your work closely and signed off on it. There’s no reason to expect anything but a positive outcome.”

  “Whenever anyone tells me that, I worry even more.”

  I left him to his worrying and, on my way out, caught sight of Xavier Mooney in his office down the hall. He was on his knees on the carpeted floor. I went in to investigate.

  The professor didn’t hear my approach. He had printed out a dozen sheets of paper and placed them on the carpet in a long line. His graying hair, which he had kept shoulder-length after Pompeii, hung to one side as he bent over the sheets to tape them together. He was humming as he worked. I was happy that the professor seemed to be in a better mood—he had been a bit down since our return from far-time, which was understandable. Being grounded in the present and watching the two junior TTE professors, Erika Baumgartner and Steven Little, do the time jumping had been hard on Dr. Mooney. He was one of the original creators of STEWie, the other being his lab partner Gabriel Rojas, who was on his well-earned sabbatical. The symptoms of the immune disease that had sent Dr. Mooney into self-imposed retirement in ancient Pompeii had all but disappeared with a change in diet. Still, even a slightly subdued immune system made him at risk for bringing back an eradicated disease like smallpox—or worse, something we didn’t know how to treat.