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

one-fourth Quebecois? Simple. My grandmother Mary met my grandfather Duncan at a picnic—that’s the Dakota and Scottish connection. Two months later they married and in due course had seven children, one of them being my father, Nate Senior. On the other side, my grandmother Renée met my grandfather Nimal at school, thereby cementing the Quebecois and Sri Lankan side of the family. They had one child, a daughter named Gigi. Gigi and Nate Senior met in college, and I’m the result.”
    “That’s quite a family story. Mine’s pretty simple.”
    “Everyone is of Norwegian ancestry?”
    “Pretty much. Lots of blue eyes and blonde hair in the family, except for me. I’m the black sheep—or rather, the brown one,” I added, giving myself a mental kick for comparing my hair and eye color to a sheep’s.
    “And Quinn?” he said as the light changed and he sped up.
    “What about him?” I asked.
    “Every other person in Thornberg seems to be from Scandinavia. Is his family from Norway as well?”
    “Oh, that. No, they’re Danish. They never quite warmed up to me, since I was from a Norwegian family and all.”
    “People are funny sometimes, aren’t they?”
    “I’d say as a rule they are, yes.”
    “Julia?”
    “Yes?”
    His attention was focused on the road. “I seem to remember promising to make shrimp curry for you again one of these days.”
    The first time the shrimp curry had come up had been at a garum shop, as we waited for Professor Mooney to swap some goods with Sabina’s father for a tunic for Nate and a dress for me. The shrimp curry, which Nate had made at a celebratory picnic after we got home, had indeed been delicious, as promised.
    “So how about next Friday, at my place?” he went on.
    Maybe I should have worn a ratty T-shirt after all. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this, for dinner with Nate. After all, dinners led to other things. I rolled down the window a bit. The inside of the car suddenly seemed too hot.
    “Julia?”
    “Friday night it is,” I said. I hoped the whole thing with Quinn would be over by then. I wanted him to stay firmly in my past. And once he was gone for good, maybe things with Nate would be clearer. It was quite possible that I was reading too much into it anyway, and he was just being polite. Perhaps all of Helen’s goading had gone to my brain.

    Restaurants and shops lined Alexandria’s wide main street, Broadway; a lot of them incorporated the word Viking into their name or had some sort of Scandinavian motif. The Runestone Museum was at the north end of the street. We parked, grabbed a quick bite of lunch at a diner, then walked down past the museum for a closer look at Big Ole, a thirty-foot-tall Viking statue. Big Ole sported a red cape, a winged helmet, and, in one muscular fist, a spear. His shield proudly proclaimed:
     
    ALEXANDRIA
    BIRTHPLACE OF
    AMERICA
     
    “How do they figure?” Nate asked, looking up at Big Ole.
    “The runestone. If it’s real, it’s the earliest record of Europeans stepping foot on future US soil.”
    “But still…it wasn’t really the start of anything, America or otherwise. And there were already people living here. My people—a quarter of them, at least.”
    “It’s good for tourism.”
    “Besides, wasn’t the runestone found near Kensington?”
    “Alexandria is the county seat.”
    “Vikings, all the way here.” He shook his head.
    “Actually, according to Dr. Holm, they wouldn’t have been Vikings by that time. Christianized Norse, she said.”
    We waited to let a car pass, then crossed the street to the museum. Before going in, we stopped to look through the fence into the area behind the main building. There was a barn, a smokehouse for curing meat, a washhouse, and several other pioneer-era structures, whether replicas or original I wasn’t sure. We headed inside and stopped to pay the admission fee in the gift shop. The gift shop, which turned out to be a precursor of the museum itself, seemed to