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

sand. Sabina was not to be treated as a research subject. If scholars wanted to thicken their classical Latin dictionaries, they could apply for a STEWie run like everyone else. Sabina was just a kid who had lost her family. I gritted my teeth at Quinn’s meddling.
    Another peal of laughter drifted through the walls.
    Jacob was a harmless crush on Sabina’s part—if anything, it made me feel better about her chances of acclimatizing to twenty-fir st-century life. After a leap of more than two thousand years, there were inevitably a few bumps, like frequent visits to the dentist, which thirteen years of decay, deposits, and no brushing had necessitated. Sabina didn’t enjoy that aspect of modern life one bit. A different sort of surprise to her was the fact that we weren’t going to marry her off. Back in Pompeii, Sabina’s grandmother and father had arranged for her an early marriage (by our standards) to a young pottery shop apprentice. Of course, they were all long gone now—whether in the Vesuvius eruption or later, of natural causes. We had never found out and probably never would.
    I got up from the kitchen table and did a loop around my small living room, mentally dividing the furniture into items that had already been in the house when Quinn and I had moved in, after my parents had left for Florida (where they were in charge of a retirement community), and items that Quinn and I had picked out together. In this second group were the big-screen TV and the ladder shelf with books and DVDs on it. Also the wall color behind the shelf, a muted orange we’d argued over because he had wanted a more manly steel blue, which I’d felt would give the house the feel of a hospital. It was one of our many arguments —other times we’d grappled about my long work hours, whose turn it was to do the dishes, Quinn’s desire to move to one coast or the other, and many more domestic grievances.
    Sounds of some kind of noisy activity drifted through from next door. I knew what it was. Abigail and Sabina had decided that Celer was overdue for a bath (a new element in his life) and that tonight would be the night. Celer fought baths with the only avenue available to him; that is to say, he made himself as heavy as he could and refused to budge from behind the door to the bathroom. It took two people to get him into the tub, and one to hold him down while the other washed. The bathroom floor and walls took a beating with each dreaded bath. I heard the water turn on and sounds of encouragement. I would have gone over to help, but two people and one dog was the limit for the small bathroom of the mother-and-law-suite.
    So the divorce papers were on the way, or would be the next day. I tried to gauge how I felt about that, not to mention Quinn’s date at Ingrid’s Restaurant, and decided I felt perfectly fine about both things, aside from the fact that he was using the divorce papers and Sabina in a carrot-and-stick approach to get what he wanted. I wondered who he was having dinner with. Someone we had both known socially, or a new acquaintance, like the grad student he had been talking up in the courtyard of the Hypatia House? Whoever it was, it was none of my business.
    I took out my laptop and flicked it to life. Perhaps needing to symbolically say goodbye to my married life, I changed the passwords to my social media accounts, which Quinn knew, wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner. It didn’t take long, as most of my time at the computer was spent on work, not personal matters. I was about to head off to bed when I remembered that somewhere on my computer was a photo of Quinn’s grandfather, the one with the Kensington Runestone. I hadn’t looked at it in years.
    Some digging around through old files produced one that was simply saved as Farfar’s Photo, as if it had been the only one ever taken of the man, which was highly unlikely. I had never met Quinn’s grandfather—Magnus had died when Quinn was still a toddler,