The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2)

by Maslakovic, Neve

  According to Nate, her life philosophy was You don’t hide your scars.

  Mary set some polenta slices onto a griddle to brown and asked Nate to make a salad. She poured the eggs into the pan, and, as the omelet sizzled, crumbled in the white cheese and added prosciutto and some parsley. She folded the omelet after a minute or two and turned it, not with the spatula, but by flipping it into the air. If I had tried a move like that, the omelet would have stuck to the pan, or, more likely, the ceiling. Maybe all it took was a firm hand and an equally firm belief that the omelet would obey the chef.

  Accompanied by the polenta and the salad Nate had put together, the omelet was delicious. You would have thought that I’d be full after the lingonberry pie at Ingrid’s and the macadamia cookies in Nate’s office, but I was still making up for the seven hours we had been stuck without food or water in 1898. Next to me Nate, too, was digging into the food.

  “What is this?” I asked, licking the softened white cheese off my fork. The taste was vaguely familiar.

  “Feta cheese,” Mary explained. “I’ve been on a Mediterranean kick this month for my cooking blog.”

  I had come across feta before in finger foods I’d organized for school events, in spinach and cheese pastries, but never in its natural state. “You have a cooking blog?” I asked between bites.

  “Just something to keep me busy in my retirement.”

  I wondered if it would be rude to invite myself over to Mary Kirkland’s house more often. It was obvious where Nate had gotten his gourmet palate.

  Mary watched us bolt down the food and added a second helping to our plates. “Don’t they feed you at St. Sunniva? Don’t mind me, I’m not hungry,” she added and set a coffeemaker brewing, then pulled up a chair. “You wanted to know about the stone.”

  I swallowed a forkful of omelet and launched into the story of what had happened, holding nothing back. I had not planned to mention Sabina but somehow it all came tumbling out—Pompeii, Sabina, Quinn and Officer Jones, Quinn’s debts, seeing the stone disinterred, everything. Mary Kirkland listened, nodding occasionally. After I finished, she got up to attend to the coffee. She filled three mugs, pushed one in my direction, along with the milk and sugar, and said, “I’d like to meet this Sabina. She sounds like quite a young lady.”

  I glanced at Nate. “We could bring her by sometime, couldn’t we? She hasn’t seen the Twin Cities yet, so we could make it a day of sightseeing.” I didn’t mean the traditional kind, where you might take a guest from out of town to see the caribou at the Minnesota Zoo or to shop at the Mall of America, but the kind where you wandered around on foot, just looking. I paused for another bite, then went on, “Mary, we were wondering if you had any insights about the runestone, either from your years at the Historical Society or from oral histories in your family.”

  “About white explorers who might have made it to Dakota land in the middle of the fourteenth century?” She gave a deep sigh. “You’ll have to remind me of some of the details. You say they came on ships from Vinland?”

  “Twenty two Norwegians and eight Gotlanders, the stone said. Ten stayed with the ships ‘by the sea’ and ten died.”

  “How did they die—does the stone say?”

  I scooped up the last of the omelet while I thought about how to delicately describe the most likely scenario. Nate shrugged. “A run-in with the Dakota or another local tribe, probably. One that didn’t end well.”

  I remembered that I had read about another possibility. “Plague carried on the Norsemen’s own clothing or effects might have flared up. But I’m not sure it could have killed ten in a single day, unless the group that had been left behind was already ill.”

  Mary sighed and set her coffee mug down. “I haven’t heard anything about the plague, but smallpox killed its fair share.”

  We waited for her to go on.

  “If I had your time machine, I wouldn’t look for a small party of explorers. I’d sweep down the land, from the ice-gripped Arctic lands all the way south to Cape Horn where the Pacific and the Atlantic meet. And I would count…”

  Nate looked uncomfortable.

  “I would count the dead,” Mary said. “When the Europeans came to the Americas, starting with Columbus, they unknowingly brought the virus with them. It swept through the land in lethal waves, like they had set a slow, unstoppable brushfire to clear their route for them. It spread from person to person, village to village, and community to community. Estimates vary—you’d be hard-pressed to find two historians who agree on the matter—but it’s possible that in the first hundred years of contact smallpox and other diseases killed every other person in the Americas, perhaps as much as ninety percent of the population. No one really knows the true number. Those are just guesses in the dark.”

  I had put my fork down long ago. The plague—the Black Death—came up on occasion as a topic of discussion during planning meetings for STEWie runs to medieval Europe and Asia, and I knew that in that case the culprit was the Y. Pestis bacterium, carried by rat fleas. Our researchers were protected against it by a vaccine, and they also received vaccines for smallpox and other defeated diseases. But even the outbreaks of the Black Death had not been as deadly as what Mary was talking about. “What made it so bad?” I asked.

  “The continent was a blank canvas for the disease. No one had any immunity to it, no genetic resistance…In the Old World, dense populations had lived in close contact with each other and livestock for centuries, experiencing waves of epidemics: smallpox, measles, the flu, tuberculosis…When de Soto’s ships came ashore in Florida in 1539, they carried a herd of pigs onboard, one of which may have been infected—Julia, is something wrong with the coffee?”

  The coffee was delicious. That wasn’t it. I felt a shiver pass through me. “I don’t even like the thought of it. It makes me glad I’m up to date on all my vaccines.”

  Perhaps Mary sensed that there was more to it than that. She topped off my coffee and said, “Land claims aside, we are all immigrants, you know, all of us. The world is a fluid place and Nate is living proof of that. You should bring Julia to one of our family picnics, Nate dear.” She smiled at him, then continued, “Why, my neighbors down the street are from Somalia. That’s the largest immigrant group to Minnesota these days, with Ethiopians being the second—did you know that? Nate’s grandfather Duncan came over as a child from Scotland back in 1935. At the turn of the century, Scandinavians and Germans were the largest immigrant groups.”

  “My great-grandparents came on a ship from Norway,” I said.

  “Here’s a statistic to keep in mind about the nineteenth century, about your great-grandparents, about the farmer who found the stone. In 1850, Minnesota had about six thousand souls, at least according to the census. By the turn of the century—just fifty years later—the number was 1.75 million. There wasn’t a gold rush or anything to make that happen—far from it. The newcomers wanted a better life and were willing to work hard for it.”

  “Still,” I said. “They displaced people who were already here.”

  “Yes. For some of us…well, our roots go all the way down to the bedrock. Thousands of years ago, my own ancestors crossed a land bridge that formed when water froze into ice sheets and the ocean levels fell. Fifty miles as the crow flies separates Asia from Alaska. Put that way it doesn’t sound like a very long distance, does it? My point is this—” She leaned forward and patted my hand. “We—all of us—stand on the shoulders of our parents, and they on the shoulders of theirs, and so on.”

  I caught myself wondering if we at St. Sunniva University had been guilty of bias in our explorations of history. Early on, it had been decided that STEWie could never be used to settle the “big” questions anyway, such as which people had a more valid claim to a certain territory, or which side had fired the first shot that started the battle that started the war. There was no way to correct historical wrongs.
Still, I felt embarrassed that I had come to ask Mary about a stone that had been carved by newcomers (whether it had happened in the nineteenth or fourteenth century), when her own ancestors had made a life on this land for thousands of years.

  We were entering our third year of STEWie runs, and most of the slots had been devoted to researching the figures that anchored history books, which was how it went with funding priorities and public interest. STEWie had been the brainchild of the science departments, so a significant number of runs had been devoted to those on whose shoulders the current crop of scientists stood, legends like Marie Curie. Clandestine visits to her lab and home—starting in the 1890s, the decade when farmer Olof Ohman had found his stone—required radiation suits. The radiation on her papers and personal things still lingered into the present. It was all circular, in a way. We already knew more about Europe’s past than that of the Americas, so it was easier for our researchers to prepare for runs to the Old World and obey time travel’s third rule, Blend in. Places and peoples that had been lost to time and textbooks were a lot harder to tackle.

  I took a sip of Mary’s rich, aromatic coffee; the one that Nate had given me in his office was just a pale, distant cousin to it. I had been worried that Mary might not welcome the idea of people sneaking a look at her ancestors, that it was disrespectful on some level. But it sounded like she felt just the opposite about it, that it might be good to know more.

  Mary stood up to take our dishes to the sink.

  “You should drop by and talk to Dr. Payne sometime,” I said, rising to my feet to help her. “He’s a bit—well, grumpy—but I think you might agree on a lot of things.”

  When Nate took Wanda outside into the yard to let her stretch her legs, Mary refilled my coffee cup. “Are you two kids dating?” she asked abruptly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nate didn’t explain one way or the other over the phone, but I’ve known him all his life. Sometimes his silences speak volumes.”

  “We’re just colleagues,” I evaded, “collaborating on this incident at the school. As the science dean’s assistant, I help out when a problem arises in one of our eight science departments. And my ex taking STEWie on a joyride, well, it’s definitely a problem.”

  “Spouses will do that. Embarrassing things, I mean.”

  “Usually not this embarrassing.”

  “Duncan and I were married for fifty-four years. A lot can happen over that much time, most of it good, once in a while bad, sometimes just strange. Nate has always been a bit hard to read,” she added in somewhat of a non sequitur. “Did he tell you about what happened at Boundary Waters and why he left?”

  I nodded.

  “He hasn’t gotten over it yet. I think it’s made his already cautious nature even more cautious. Well, you’re young, both of you. I will tell you one thing: At your age, I wouldn’t have let a little thing like an estranged husband on the lam stop me. Life’s an adventure. Do you and Quinn have any children?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not the motherly type. I can’t even keep a potted cactus alive. And Quinn—well, he’s not a homebody either.”

  “Not everyone is cut out for it, I suppose.”

  “Thanks for not saying the opposite.”

  “Which?”

  “That once I hold my own offspring in my arms I’ll suddenly discover some hidden, primal Julia who knows exactly what to do about poopy diapers and runny noses. I wouldn’t. I’m much better with them once they’re young adults. I feel like the students in the science departments are all mine to take care of, in a way.”

  “And Nate keeps peace and order on campus. Yes, I see.”

  Wondering what it was she saw, I leaned forward on my elbows, the coffee cup between them. All I could see was that my life was in a bit of a muddle. I wondered if she—and Nate—thought that I still had feelings for Quinn. It wasn’t black and white. Very few things in life were. I certainly didn’t love Quinn anymore, but I didn’t hate him either…and I didn’t want to. Hate was a feeling that weighed you down, making it harder to walk through life. It was like being time-stuck in History.

  When Nate came back inside, he asked his grandmother the question that had brought us here. “Kunshi, the runestone…Real or not?”

  Smiling at him, she considered the question. “The Minnesota Historical Society did offer an opinion, a favorable one, back in 1910, you know. As for me—I think I’d prefer to give the man who found it the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Olof Ohman,” I supplied.

  “Olof Ohman, that’s right. I figure it’s like being on a jury. We have to assume Olof was innocent until he’s proven guilty.”

  “That’s not how it is in academia,” I said, conscious of sounding like Dr. Payne. “The burden of proof is on the presenter of new evidence, especially if the claim is an extraordinary one.”

  “I know. That’s why I never went for a higher degree. Too confining, I felt. As for the stone—there is an account in Dakota history. I may not be the best person to tell it, but I know a couple of people who are…If you need someone knowledgeable to come along with you to the fourteenth century, they fit the bill. They know a lot about a lot of things. You’ll like Ron. And Ruth-Ann, well, she’s a younger version of me. Make sure to ask her about the Good Earth Woman’s story.”

  I already had my yellow pad out. “The Good Earth Woman…Ron and Ruth-Ann, you said?”

  “Ron and Ruth-Ann Tuttle. They can be a bit hard to reach, but let me get you their number.”

  16

  The names of the wife and husband pair who had been recommended by Nate’s grandmother sounded familiar—I remembered leafing through their book in the library. Ruth-Ann and Ron Tuttle were amateur historians and archeologists. Their book had been sandwiched between a thick tome whose flowery academic prose I couldn’t tolerate for more than a few pages and another that I also put back immediately, though for different reasons. (It claimed to offer proof that aliens built the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica. This was a theory that showed up often in emails and letters sent to the dean’s office; any evidence to the contrary brought back from STEWie runs in the form of photos or footage was deemed fake.) The Tuttles’ privately published book occupied the sweet spot between academic tome and conspiracy fluff in its content as well. I had found it very readable. They seemed to be the all-around experts in everything runestone-related.

  Once I got back to my office, I called the number Mary had given me but the line had been disconnected. Mary had also mentioned a website, so I looked there and sent an email to the address listed, hoping that wherever they were they had access to a computer. I lingered on the website after sending off the email. It seemed to have a bit of everything—there were pages devoted to Native American petroglyphs as well as a section on the Kensington runestone and other finds of possible Norse origin. Like their book, Runestone: Rock Solid, the website had maps of potential Norse routes inland and copies of documents, including the letter written in Olof Ohman’s own hand. One thing had me scratching my head. Neither the book nor the website gave the authors’ opinions of the stone’s provenance. The “Rock Solid” part of the title appeared to refer to the natural hardness of graywacke, not the preponderance of evidence in favor of the runestone’s legitimacy. I wondered what the Tuttles would make of the footage we had taken of the farmer unearthing the stone.

  I hoped they’d get back to me before Friday’s run.

  In the meantime, I went to talk to Dr. Payne. I found him in the courtyard of the History building. He was sitting on a bench with his back to the lake, grading papers on one knee and enjoying a cigarette.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Dr. Payne. I came to ask—thanks.” He had made room for me on the bench. “I came to ask if you wanted to come along with us to 1362.”

  I hoped he would say no. The thought of spending a few days essentially camping with the
chain-smoking professor did not appeal to me. Still, I felt that the dean’s office had to extend the invitation since the Americas were his playground, research-wise, even though he had voted against the run.

  The idea of bringing him along hadn’t appealed to Nate either. When we discussed it on the drive back from his grandmother’s house, he had said, “I’m not sure he’s physically fit enough. We don’t know how much walking we’ll have to do. There’ll be backpacks to carry. And if it takes a while or we get time-stuck, we might have to hunt for food—”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Buffalo, elk, deer, beaver, otter, whatever we can find.”

  “Ugh. Aren’t you a parks person? Can’t we just fish? I think I can handle fish.”

  “Nothing wrong with hunting if you follow the park rules. But no, I wasn’t serious. We’ll bring along freeze-dried meals and energy bars. Though if we really wanted to blend into the era, we would have to do just that—hunt and fish and pick berries and so on.”

  “Well, then I’m happy that we have no hope of blending in. I don’t mind roughing it, but I draw a line at shooting animals.”

  “But fish would be okay?”

  “Yes. They’re cold and slippery.”

  Dr. Payne puffed on his cigarette and answered my question about whether he wanted to come along with a single syllable. “No.”

  “Why not?” I felt compelled to ask. “You don’t think we have a hope of finding them?”

  “It’s not that. I’ve already wasted enough time on this, time I should be spending on my own work. Yes, I know that a week in the fourteenth century would amount to only an afternoon here, but it’s a week in my lifetime, and I don’t feel like I have that many left.” He took a deep drag off the cigarette with no apparent sense of irony. “Besides, why do you need me to come along?”