Free The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) by Neve Maslakovic

gain. The good farmer got all of ten dollars for his find from the Minnesota Historical Society after the stone changed hands.” As an aside, I added, “If it had been me, I think I would have charged people who wanted to see where the stone was dug up. Nothing wrong with making a bit of extra spending money.”
    “It makes him seem like an honest man, this farmer of yours.”
    “I guess.”
    Nate had once told me that in his experience most crimes came down to one of five motives: greed, desire, fear, jealousy, or desperation. We discussed them each in turn and ruled out fear and desperation as motives for Olof Ohman, and also, per our discussion, greed. That left the Scandinavian immigrant community’s jealousy of the Italian immigrant community over the whole Columbus issue…or, a shade more nobly, Olof’s desire to see his Viking ancestors get their dues.
    Nate gave a small shrug. “If it was a hoax, then your farmer—”
    “Olof Ohman.”
    “—Olof Ohman may have done it just to get his name into newspapers. Generally speaking, to run a successful scam— whatever the motive, money or fame—you have to give people what they want, something big for their eyes to feast on. Like a letter saying you’ve won a million dollars and they’d be happy to send you the money after you pay the small transfer fee of $250. If you were already enthusiastic about the idea of Vikings in Minnesota— and I’m not talking about the football team—then I suppose farmer Olof Ohman’s ‘find’ would have been just the thing.”
    “Yes, that makes sense. The runestone would be the missing link between the Vikings of old and the Scandinavian-Americans who live in the Kensington area. It’s what people want.”
    He brought up another possibility as he slowed down to turn onto the exit for Alexandria. “Could it have been a joke that got out of hand?”
    “You mean Olof Ohman might have made it up because he wanted something to do during the long Minnesota winters? Could be. It’s just that he looks dead serious in all of his photos. But then they all did.”
    “It can’t have been an easy life, not for an immigrant farmer trying to eke out a living. Then again, I would think his family and neighbors would have noticed if he had lugged a stone into his barn and started spending a lot of time in there.”
    “Why would they?” I said a bit more snappily than I intended.
    He glanced over at me. “I just meant that it was a tight-knit community. Nowadays people spend years living across the street from someone without ever meeting them. It wasn’t like that back then.”
    He was right, of course. Even the neighbor I knew best, Martha, probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d taken to carving stones in the privacy of my garage. But that was how it went today—we didn’t rely on our neighbors for help with daily problems or even a cup of something hot in the evening. Our support networks were geographically broader—my parents lived in Florida, my cousins were in Austin, and my best friend from college had moved to Seattle.
    Nate slowed down to a stop at a red light. “Hey, how come you haven’t seen this stone before? Didn’t you grow up in this area?”
    “I was sick the day of the school trip. My parents wrote about this kind of stuff, but they never thought to take me along. They ran the local newspaper—not the campus one, the Thornberg one—back in the days when everyone read it and you could make a decent living selling ad space.” Quinn had always meant to take me to see his grandfather’s stone, but we had never gotten around to it. And by the end of our relationship, I was tired of hearing about it.
    Since Nate had asked me a personal question, I decided it would only be fair play if I asked one in return. “What about you, how did you end up with such a motley collection of grandparents?”
    He flashed a grin at me. “You mean, one-fourth Dakota, one-fourth Scottish, one-fourth Sri Lankan, and