Caught (Missing) (6 page)

Jonah didn’t think so.

“I wonder—,” Katherine began.

Just then they heard the bedroom door rattle. In a flash Katherine turned the knob to put out their lamp.

“Put everything back where it was!” Jonah hissed in her ear.

Fumbling in the darkness, he shoved the picture of Lieserl back into the secret compartment and eased the carved wood back into place. Then he began throwing papers back into the drawer.

The bedroom door opened, revealing Albert Einstein holding a lamp of his own.

“What if the square root is the answer?” he mumbled.

He stepped forward and pulled the bedroom door shut behind him. Then he walked to the table and sat down. He turned the knob on his lamp to make it brighter, the flame illuminating a wider and wider circle. Jonah and Katherine were only a few feet away from him—Jonah could see the light glowing right through Katherine, clearly revealing all the papers she hadn’t been able to put away yet.

But Albert kept his head bent over the papers on the table, completely unaware.

“I think, if we just finish cleaning up without making any noise, we’ll be okay,” Jonah whispered as softly as he could.

Katherine nodded and went back to sliding papers into the drawer. This time she was careful to match them up with their tracers. She slid the drawer silently back into the desk, and Jonah did the same with his.

As far as Jonah could tell, Albert didn’t look up even once. He didn’t move at all, except to send his pen flying across the paper.

“I guess we might as well sleep, if he’s going to work all night,” Katherine whispered.

Jonah nodded.

The couch turned out to be too low to sleep under, so the best they could do was to press themselves as close to the wall as possible. Jonah thought he’d be out the minute he closed his eyes, but lowering his eyelids meant that he could see all the horrific images of the day, all over again: Jonah’s entire science class sitting frozen in time, Angela’s car barreling toward Katherine, Chip’s clammy face appearing and vanishing, Mileva’s hands closing over the Elucidator.

What does any of it mean?
Jonah wondered.
What are we supposed to do?

He wasn’t aware of actually falling asleep—it was more that he kept seeing the images play and replay in his head, and after a while they seemed to be parts of nightmares more than actual memories.

It was a relief when he woke up to bright sunshine streaming in through the window.

Well, there,
he thought.
We survived the night. And today’s got to be better. We’ll find some way to get the Elucidator back from Mileva. We’ll figure out some way to solve everything and go home.

That was when he heard the screaming.

It was a female voice, so Jonah looked around immediately for Katherine.

She was right beside him, and also jerking her head frantically back and forth, trying to see what was wrong. The sunlight streamed right through her—her body left no shadow on the floor—so Jonah could cross off “We must have lost our invisibility, and someone saw us!” as a reason for the screaming.

He looked toward the table where Albert Einstein had been working the night before, but it was deserted now. Jonah looked toward the desk he and Katherine had searched—had they left something out? Had they completely messed up?

No—the desk looked just as it had the night before, the drawers lined up perfectly.

Jonah listened harder, and could make out actual words in the screaming: “Albert! Oh, Albert!”

Was the screaming coming from outside the apartment? Maybe even from the street down below?

Jonah heard a sound of feet pounding their way unevenly up the stairs. The door leading out of the apartment slammed open, just as a sleepy-looking Albert stumbled out of the bedroom. With his hair mashed to the side and a look of confusion on his face, he looked even less like the venerable old-man Einstein than before.

“Did I oversleep?” he asked. “Am I late for work?”

Mileva tripped coming into the apartment.

“No, no, it’s Lieserl,” she sobbed.

Albert moved quickly across the floor, shutting the apartment door behind his wife.

“What about Lieserl?” he said cautiously. His voice was quiet, and he put his hand on Mileva’s shoulder in a way that seemed to be intended to quiet her down too.

Mileva shook his hand away.

“I went down to get the milk and there was a telegram—” She held up a tattered-looking piece of paper. “She has scarlet fever.”

Mileva sagged against the wall.

Albert started to reach for her again, hesitated, and then drew his hand back.

“Scarlet fever can be . . . difficult,” he said, wincing painfully. “This is a new variable to deal with.”

Jonah wasn’t quite sure what scarlet fever was, but even he could tell: That had been the wrong thing to say.

Mileva buried her face in her hands.

“No, no,” she wailed, shaking her head hard.

Albert tried to hug her, but she jerked away.

“I’m going there,” she announced, limping furiously toward the bedroom. “I’ll pack now and take the first train out—a child should have her mother with her when she’s ill.”

Where is this Lieserl?
Jonah wondered.
Some kind of boarding school?

Albert and Mileva didn’t look quite old enough to have a child off at boarding school—well, Albert didn’t. And, anyhow, Jonah kind of thought that if Lieserl was old enough to be away at boarding school, he would have found more pictures in the secret compartment showing her as she’d grown up.

Albert trailed after Mileva.

“You don’t know . . . how she’ll be . . . when you get there,” he said, standing on the threshold. “It’s such a long train ride. It could take days. And what will I tell people about where you’ve gone? Or why?”

“I—don’t—care!” Mileva said, and slammed the bedroom door in his face.

Albert just stood there looking stunned.

Jonah probably had the same expression on his face, because Katherine jabbed him in the side.

“What are
we
going to do?” she asked in a whisper.

“Huh?” Jonah said.

Then he realized what she was asking. Mileva was going somewhere that could be days away. Should he and Katherine stay here, with Albert Einstein, who was thinking the wrong thoughts?

Or should they go with Mileva, who had their Elucidator?

They chose Mileva.

“Because of Lieserl, too,” Katherine argued in a whisper, as the sounds of frantic packing drifted out from the bedroom. “If she’s one of the missing children of history, then she’s connected to us. Well, you, anyway. She might need us to save her.”

Jonah sank down onto the couch, feeling oddly nostalgic for 1483. When they’d gone back to that year on their very first trip through time, the only thing Jonah had cared about was rescuing his friends Chip and Alex. Period. He’d barely been aware of what it meant to preserve time; he hadn’t thought much about the consequences his actions might have within the next five minutes, let alone centuries later.

Since then, all of their trips through time had been
complicated. He’d seen time buckle and crack, splinter and split. He’d seen the results of his smallest actions ripple forward, and decisions he’d made in a heartbeat become matters of life or death.

This time around—why were they here? Who had sent them? How could they possibly know what their priorities should be?

“Besides, even if we stayed here, we wouldn’t know what to do to get Albert Einstein to stop thinking about the wrong things,” Katherine argued. “We need to get that Elucidator back, and we need it to work!”

Crystalline tears glistened in the corners of her eyes, and Jonah saw that, no matter how certain she sounded, she was worried too.

“And we need something to eat,” Jonah said. “I’ve been starving since science class yesterday.”

“How can you think about food at a time like this?” Katherine asked.

“How can you not?” Jonah countered.

Just then Mileva opened the bedroom door again and struggled out, carrying a worn bag. It reminded Jonah of something Mary Poppins would carry.

“If I hurry I can make the eight o’clock train to Zurich,” she said.

“Bern to Zurich—that’s an easy trip,” Albert agreed.
“But then, won’t you have to change trains in Munich and Salzburg and Vienna and Budapest?”

Katherine elbowed Jonah.

“Bern’s in Switzerland, right?” she whispered. “So we’re in Europe again! Europe!”

“Duh!” Jonah whispered back. “Don’t you think that’s why we’ve been listening to Albert and Mileva speaking German all this time?”

But he hadn’t thought about their geographical location until now either. All that had mattered was the time.

Albert was still trying to talk to Mileva.

“When will you even get to Novi Sad?” he asked.

“As soon as I can!” Mileva snapped, jerking the bag past him.

“But—can you manage the trip alone?” Albert asked.

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” Mileva answered. “You can’t take time off work. Not for this. Not for Lieserl.”

There was a sob hidden behind the words, but, to Jonah’s surprise, Mileva didn’t start crying. She bent her head and seemed to be concentrating only on moving the bag forward, moving her limping leg forward, moving her bag forward . . .

“I can walk you to the station,” Albert said, making it sound as though he’d just made a huge decision. He took the bag from Mileva’s hands and then, a second later, put
it down on the table in the middle of the room. “And, here. Let’s pack some food for you to have on the train.”

He darted into the kitchen and began pulling out bread and sausages and cheese. Jonah scrambled in behind him and managed to grab two large chunks of bread while Albert and Mileva weren’t looking. Jonah grinned triumphantly at Katherine and demonstrated how it was possible to hide one of the chunks with his hand while he was eating it.

She rolled her eyes at him. But Jonah noticed that she did step into the kitchen to take the other chunk from him.

Albert began bringing out more and more food.

“There’s not time for that!” Mileva protested. “Let’s just go!”

Albert wrapped all the food in a dish towel and went back to the table to tuck the bundle into Mileva’s bag. He quickly added a few books and several of the papers that he’d left strewn across the table.

“So you’ll have something to think about on the train,” he explained.

“I already have plenty to think about,” Mileva said sadly, turning away from the desk. Had she been getting something out of the desk while Jonah was watching Albert?

Or—putting something into it?

An awful thought struck Jonah.

“What if Mileva’s not taking the Elucidator with her?” he muttered to Katherine. “What if she’s just put it in the desk? Or left it in the bedroom? How would we know? We should have followed her into that bedroom. We should have—”

“Walked through a closed door? How?” Katherine argued. But she grimaced in dismay. “We should have searched the bedroom while they were in the kitchen. We’ll have to do it now, before they’re gone! Then we can look in the desk and follow them . . .”

But Albert had already shouldered the bag, put on a hat, and walked out of the apartment. He was holding the door for Mileva to step out behind him.

“We’ll lose them!” Jonah hissed back at Katherine. “We won’t know which way to go!”

Mileva stopped on the threshold and looked back.

“Yes, that’s right,” Albert murmured behind her. “Memorize every detail of our happy home. Carry it in your heart while you’re away.”

He bent to kiss her, but the kiss only brushed her cheek. She kept her head turned, her eyes darting about.

And then, while Albert wasn’t looking, she pulled something partway out of her skirt pocket, palming it in a way that showed it only to the room behind her.

It was the Elucidator. She was showing them that she still had the Elucidator.

A moment later Albert and Mileva were gone.

Jonah couldn’t move.

“Did she hear us whispering?” he asked Katherine. “Did she know we were wondering about the Elucidator?”

“She couldn’t have,” Katherine said. “We weren’t that loud.
Albert
didn’t hear us.”

“But she knows . . . something,” Jonah said, still rattled.

“And that’s why we’ve got to follow her,” Katherine said.

They waited a few more seconds to make sure that Albert and Mileva were far enough ahead that they wouldn’t see the apartment door opening and closing, seemingly all by itself. They tiptoed down the stairs, and had to slip out another door to get to the street.

“Albert and Mileva both put on hats, right before they
walked out the door,” Katherine whispered. “We’ll just watch for the hats!”

They opened the door to outside—and everyone on the street was wearing a hat.

“Got any other ideas?” Jonah asked.

He didn’t wait for Katherine to answer, because he’d thought of something himself. He darted over to a lamppost and shimmied up it. He looked right and left, staring out over the tops of dozens of hats. And then, in the next block up, he saw a feather on a hat bobbing up and down unevenly, as if the person wearing the hat was limping.

“That way,” he mouthed to Katherine, and pointed.

He climbed down, and the two of them began making their way along the crowded sidewalk. It wasn’t easy. He’d walked invisibly through a crowd before—in the fifteenth century—but people hadn’t seemed packed in together so tightly then.

Maybe because they were all afraid of catching lice or fleas or the creeping crud from each other?
Jonah thought, remembering how grotesque the people in fifteenth-century London had seemed to him.

The people around him here seemed clean and healthy and orderly—and that was the problem. They were always stepping politely out of the way for someone: “After you.”
“Oh, no, by all means, you go first.” And that meant that Jonah was constantly in danger of bumping into one of them.