The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (26 page)

32

The repetitive clink of chisel on stone drifted to where Nate and I were crouching behind a white pine. Quinn was on his knees by the chair-size stone, a hammer in his right hand, the chisel in his left. He had pinned a piece of paper to the ground with a stick to prevent it from flying off in the wind. Occasionally he would pause to reference the paper, then return to the chiseling.

“You can stop now, Quinn,” I called out without considering whether it was a good idea to do so.

Quinn gave a startled oath and dropped his tools. Mine must have been the last voice he’d expected to hear in the
fourteenth
-century woodland. He jumped to his feet as Nate and I emerged from behind the tree. You’d think he would have at least had the decency to look chagrined as he greeted us. “Jules, you startled me. And who do we have here, the chief of campus security? What are you two doing here in the woods? No, don’t say it, I know—you’re looking for me. Do you realize what this means?” He blew on his hand—I hoped the chisel had given him a good scrape—and dabbed it on his Hawaiian shirt.

“What might that be?” Nate asked.

“That I acquired all my blisters for nothing.” He said this as if he had gotten a broken bone by saving a drowning puppy. His shirt was looking a little worse for wear; there was a tear on one parrot-and-palm-tree-covered shoulder and a fine white dust all over from the chiseling.

“Well, it was worth a try.” Quinn gave a no-worries shrug. “How have you been, Chief? Haven’t seen you since that Walleyes cookout.”

The Walleyes was the town fishing club. Quinn had
belonged to it briefly. He hadn’t brought back many fish, but it had afforded him an opportunity to fill the weekend hours with an activity that was of no interest to me. Nate was a member, too. Which was all beside the point. The point was that I couldn’t believe my ears. Worth a try?
Worth a try?
He had thrown the whole Time Travel Engineering department into disarray, disrupted people’s roster spots, wasted the security office’s time, not to mention put Sabina at risk of exposure. Before I could do what I really wanted to do (yell at him), Nate asked in an even tone, “Where is Dr. Holm?”

I realized that I had completely forgotten about her.

Quinn acted as if he hadn’t heard. “You’re looking a little charred, Jules, were you lighting a fire or something?”

“Where is Dr. Holm?” Nate repeated his question more forcefully. His hand crept onto the weapon on his hip.

“Isn’t my company enough for you, Chief? Dagmar went to gather raspberries. We’re running a bit low on food—one of our backpacks was stolen by a bear. I can tell that you’ve been through some adventures, too,” he said with another glance at our clothes. “Like I said, Dagmar went off to gather berries before the storm hits, and I offered to take over the chiseling for a bit.” He said it as if it had been a gentlemanly, chivalrous thing to do. “We only did it because we got tired of looking for the Vikings, you know. Did you happen to see them while you were looking for us?”

“Not a footprint,” I said.

“Darn. Dagmar and I looked, believe me, we looked until I was sick of eating granola bars and walking and the mosquitoes and I lost track of how many jumps we’d made and the battery in our Slingshot-thingie was drained.”

I thought I heard the rustle of a squirrel or another small animal behind me, just inside the forest line, but saw nothing.

Quinn was still reminiscing. “I pitched my idea to Dagmar over wine during our first dinner together. We were going to jump around a bit, find the Vikings, prove Farfar’s runestone is real, and everybody would be delighted about it. But no one’s shown up. So…” He trailed off, then added, “She’s going to be disappointed that our, uh,
project
didn’t pan out. All that hard work for nothing.” He dabbed his hand on his shirt some more. “I should have brought work gloves. Setting up the stone was an
undertaking
—we had to chip off a bit of it to get a smooth surface. And then the chiseling…I already have, let’s see, one…two…
three
blisters.”

I stared at Quinn open-mouthed. He seemed to be treating the whole thing as a prank rather than what it was, a serious criminal matter. He also seemed to be saying in no uncertain terms that Dr. Holm had brought
him
, not the other way around. I glanced at Nate. He and Quinn were facing each other across the new runestone, with Nate looking ready to punch Quinn, if only such actions were permitted to a law enforcement officer. He still had his hand on the holster but hadn’t pulled out his weapon. Which was unfortunate because he didn’t have time to react to what happened next.

Someone stuck a gun into the small of my back.

“No one move,” a woman’s high-pitched voice said in a parody of a bad thriller. She had crept silently out of the woods.

My knowledge about guns amounted to what I’d learned from TV melodramas, but the one in the small of my back felt bigger and sturdier than the one Nate pulled out in slow motion and pointed at Dagmar over my shoulder. I hoped for the best scenario—that neither gun would work—but if one of them
did
work, that it would be Nate’s.

“I knew it,” I said, without daring to turn to look at Dagmar. She was shorter than me, so Nate had to be aiming at the top of her head. “I knew that Quinn didn’t drag you here against your will.”

Quinn, for his part, suddenly got very chatty again. “Dagmar, there you are. The chisel slipped and I managed to scratch both the stone and myself. Excuse me while I spray some antiseptic on it. My hand, not the stone, of course, ha ha.” He headed for the lone backpack sitting on the ground by the stone and started to rummage, carrying on a one-sided conversation all the while. “Did you find any berries? Oh, here’s the first aid kit. By the way, have you met Jules? And the man pointing the weapon at you is Chief Kirkland from the campus security office.”

“She and I have met,” I said.

Quinn spritzed antiseptic on his hand. “So Chief Kirkland, how did you find us?”

Nate didn’t seemed inclined to answer, so I did. I thought it would be better not to mention the others. “You’ve been leaving behind footprints and cookie packaging. Before that—well, Dr. Holm sent me a text message asking for help and Nate thought she might be in trouble. I had my doubts. We found a disturbed computer station in the TTE lab, like she had been dragged into STEWie’s basket against her will.”

“You’re on a first name basis with our security chief here, Jules? A text message and a disturbed computer? Excuse me for a moment while I apply a bandage…I thought I heard a crash while I waited in the Time Machine basket for her to program in our destination. Dagmar said it was nothing out of the ordinary, just one of the mirrors jumping its track. Then we got to Woodstock. Now
that
was something. Nobody even gave us a
second
look. My shirt must have done the trick.”

I was happy to see that mosquito bites covered Quinn’s arms beneath his short-sleeved shirt. His beige khakis, their knees brown from squatting in the dirt, completed the look. Quinn threw a look down at his pants. “Should have brought a black pair and a garden kneeler. Too bad neither of us has a green thumb, eh, Jules?”

I didn’t dignify that with an answer.

“It’s over, Dr. Holm,” Nate said as a rumble of rolling thunder filled the sudden silence between us. Nate’s hands were steady as he pointed the gun above my shoulder. I noticed that there were calluses on his fingers from the first night’s attempt to make a fire by rubbing sticks together. The barrel in the small of my back had started to shake slightly, as if Dr. Holm’s hands were getting tired. Must have been all that chiseling.

“If I let you go back, my career is over,” Dr. Holm pointed out, and I felt the barrel jam into my back with renewed force. Nate might have made the wrong move by using the honorific before her name.

“As things stand,” Nate said evenly, “your worries should be bigger than whether or not your career is over. What you should be concerned about is prison time. The length of it. Put the gun down.”

“Was your plan to slap all the blame on Quinn?” I asked over my shoulder. “Were you going to return alone with some sob story about being kidnapped? Let me guess. You were going to say that you stumbled across this new runestone but then he pointed the gun at you. While you tried to wrestle it away, it went off, leaving you to come back the hero—and with firm knowledge of the location of a Norse artifact? By the way, the message asking for help, why did you send it to me and not the police?”

“Who texts the police? I thought it was a nice touch. You were so obsessed with the whole thing anyway…Why was that?”

I just stood silent. I certainly wasn’t going to mention Sabina.

Having finished with his bandage, which was ridiculously large for the size of his rather minor wound, Quinn sprang lightly to his feet. “No one would have bought that story. People know me better than that. Jules, you didn’t believe for a minute that I—”

“Maybe for a minute,” I allowed. “By the way, where are the divorce papers?”

Quinn smacked himself on the forehead with his uninjured hand. “I forgot to mail them off.”

“Isn’t this a nice family reunion?” Dagmar said. “And don’t kid yourself, Quinn. You were using me as much as I was using you. Episode one of
History’s Dirty Secrets
—stumbling on a genuine Viking artifact in the middle of a fourteenth-century woodland.”

Quinn gave Dr. Holm a frank look. “Dagmar, dear, I thought this was a joint venture on our part—that we’d come back hand in hand, hero and heroine, co-discoverers of the true story of the runestone. In fact, I was going to ask you to be my partner and co-host for the reality show.”

The gun against my back slipped a bit. “Did you really have backing for the show?”

“I had a plan. For the show, for me, for us. You would have been happy.”

This was getting sickening.

“Happy?” She gave a back-of-the-throat snort. “Happy? I’m on my third post-doc. I thought this was the one, that I would finally get a junior professorship. A find like this runestone would have had universities fighting for the chance to hire me.”

That would likely have been true. Quinn’s chance visit to her office had given her a way out of the academic sinkhole she was in. She must have quickly hatched a plan that Quinn was more than willing to go along with. But looking for the Norsemen had turned out to be the equivalent of finding a needle in the haystack of History, just like Dr. Payne had said it would be. So Dagmar had turned to Plan B, to carve a stone. After Quinn had finished helping her chisel it and the “discovery” was filmed, she wouldn’t have needed him anymore. I highly doubted that she would have let the one witness to her crime live to tell the tale.

The barrel of the hunting handgun was still firmly lodged against my back. The thunder was getting nearer and louder, so there was always a chance that lightning might strike Dagmar. I could hope.

I wondered idly if the lightning would travel down the metal barrel of the gun and into me.

“I’d like to avoid a shoot-out, Dr. Holm,” Nate said as the first drops of rain started to fall. After a moment’s deliberation, he added, “Here, I’ll put my weapon down first.”

He laid it down on the ground. I hoped the gamble would pay off.

Dagmar jabbed me in the back. “Go stand over there, by Chief Kirkland.”

I did. Dr. Holm’s gun was now pointed at both of us.

Quinn sauntered over toward her.

“Dagmar, darling, I’m afraid I have to side with Chief
Kirkland on this one. I’ve had enough blood for one day. I might need stitches, what do you think, Chief Kirkland?”

He unwrapped the bandage to reveal a tiny scrape, shoving it under Nate’s nose, undoubtedly in an effort to defuse the situation. It didn’t work. At that moment we heard our friends’ approaching voices over the sound of the storm. They would be over the hilltop in seconds. I felt my hand slide into my pocket for something, anything to defend myself with.

I saw Dagmar’s eyes open wide and her finger tense as she pressed the trigger.

33

There was no shot. The only thing that actually happened was that the granola bar I threw at Dagmar bounced off her body and fell to the ground.

She pulled the trigger again, a look of confusion on her face.

“When you have more time travel experience under your belt,” said Dr. B, emerging from the tree line, “you’ll find that modern devices often do not work as you’d expect while you’re in the field. History is a force to be reckoned with.” Ruth-Ann and Jacob were on her heels, burdened not only with their own gear but also with the backpacks Nate and I had left behind. Ron leaned on his walking stick a few steps behind them. “The retort of a gun this close to the village is just not possible, I’m afraid. You should have brought a knife instead.”

“Don’t give her any ideas,” I said.

Dagmar’s face had gone bright red, making her look like an unusually angry pixie.

“Let’s leave the discussions for later,” Nate said, flinching as Dagmar shouted in frustration. He bent down to pick up his weapon and return it to its holster.

The others caught sight of the stone, on which Dagmar and Quinn’s combined efforts had yielded a scant two lines of text. I heard Ruth-Ann emit a gasp of surprise at the blatant attempt at deception. Jacob was already snapping photos of the stone.

Dr. B dropped her backpack and shook her head, “Of all the things to do in the past…” She didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

Nate reached around to retrieve something from his belt. Handcuffs. He had brought handcuffs.

“Well, now that we’re all here,” said Quinn, “I suppose we should head back, Dagmar—Dagmar, where are you going?”

Dagmar had picked something up from where our things were gathered and was trotting away from us, the gun still in one hand. A brief flash of lightning split the sky to the southwest of us and she stopped in her tracks as if an idea had struck her the instant the lightning struck the ground.

She turned, lifted the gun, and fired as the thunder broke over the forest. I threw myself on the ground and Nate ducked, but she wasn’t aiming at us. The shot went clean through the Slingshot 1.0, which was sitting on the ground next to where Dr. B had set her backpack, leaving behind a penny-size hole in the device.

“The stone doesn’t matter anyway,” Dagmar spat out as the wind and rain whipped her hair around her face. “It was just a rung in a ladder—I want to find Vinland.”

“Vinland?” Quinn said as if this was the first he was hearing of her plan. “How on earth would we do that?”

“By following the Norsemen back, you…you
dolt
.”

“Dr. Holm,” Nate began.

“But Dagmar, darling, we never saw any Norsemen. Not a one,” Quinn interjected, still in a cheery tone. “I suppose bringing back photos of the new stone would have resulted in more runs in the Time Machine for you. Well, none of it is likely to happen now, is it? By the way, Jules, you never did tell me how you found us?”

Before Dr. B had a chance to explain about History funneling us into the same spot, Dagmar took off.

“We’ll catch up with her,” Quinn said. “It’s not like she can really go anywhere…” His eyes were focused on the rapidly retreating back of the linguistics postdoc.

“Sorry, Jules,” he said and took off after Dr. Holm.

“STEWie’s basket,” Dr. Baumgartner said with a gasp, the punctured Slingshot 1.0 at her feet. “She took the Callback. If they get to Runestone Island first, we’ll be stranded here.”

A few steps more and Dagmar was in the trees, Quinn on her heels.

“Did I mention she’s a runner?” I said to Nate as lightning split the sky above us again.