The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Read Free Page B

thought of it immediately when you mentioned the runestone . Why don’t you send Quinn to talk to Dagmar?”
    “Who is she?”
    “Dr. Dagmar Holm is a postdoc here in the department, a runic linguist. She might be able to explain to Quinn why the runestone story is just a myth—a popular one, but a myth nonetheless. Maybe he’ll accept an objective opinion better than a refusal from you.”
    “I’ll see if I can catch him.”
    “I’ll let Dagmar know.”
    I hung up the phone and stuck my head out the window. The rain had tapered off. Quinn was in the courtyard, leaning on the frog umbrella as he chatted with a female graduate student. I thought I saw the dean’s straight back and black umbrella in the throng of students milling in and out of the courtyard on their way to class, so I waited until she had disappeared into the building before calling out Quinn’s name.
    He turned in my direction, said something no doubt charming to the graduate student, and took a few steps over to the still-dripping white birch outside my office window. “Did you change your mind, Jules?”
    “No. But there’s someone I want you to talk to. Her name is Dr. Dagmar Holm and she works in the English Department.” I pointed to the square cement building, somewhat of a campus eyesore, which squatted by the bend in the lake. Though everyone called it the English Department, its official name was the Department of Classical, Medieval, and Modern Languages. “She’ll be expecting you.”
    “Julia, is there a problem?”
    I waved Quinn along and turned from the window. The dean had poked her head in on the way to her office next door. Formerly of the Earth Sciences Department, Dr. Isobel Braga was a geologist by training and my new boss. She was not one of the few people who knew the whole Pompeii story.
    “Just a personal matter,” I explained. I grabbed the stack of referral letters that needed her signature from my desk and accompanied her to her office. “How was the meeting?”
    Dean Braga had been showing potential donors around the History Alive exhibit at the campus museum. The exhibit represented the fruits of the STEWie project. One of its star attractions was a somewhat blurry photo, enlarged and taken from behind a bush, showing the muscular, tanned, and bearded builders of Stonehenge in prehistoric Britain. In another corner of the exhibition hall, heartbreaking footage of the sinking Titanic taken from a time-traveling buoy looped in ten-minute intervals.
    Dean Braga deposited her black umbrella with perhaps slightly more force than necessary in the coat rack just inside the door. “It didn’t go terribly well. I think I just wasted an hour.”
    “They weren’t impressed with the exhibit?”
    She shook her head. “It’s not that. They’ve heard that MIT is constructing a bigger STEWie.”
    That happened to be true.
    “But bigger is not necessarily—”
    “—better, yes. I tried to get the point across that the reason we’ve had trouble getting near primary historical figures is because of History’s constraints, not any fault on our part, and that MIT will face the same problems.” She dropped into the leather chair behind her desk and shook her head.
    “They always ask why we don’t try again the next day and the day after and the day after that, as if each STEWie run isn’t such a large drain on energy and resources. I explained that research is never easy and that results rarely just fall into one’s lap—that confirming who shot JFK, which seemed to be their main interest,” she said, echoing what Helen had said moments earlier, “will take longer than the months of planning that the Department of American History has already put into the project . Hiding a fleet of cameras around Dealey Plaza is no easy task. And we have to make sure that the people placing them and retrieving go under the radar, too.”
    “Did you explain that maneuvering in a time period not your own is ‘like navigating a