Caught (Missing) (7 page)

“Let’s just walk in the street,” he whispered to Katherine. “It’ll be easier.”

“They still have some horses and carriages out there, along with the cars and trolleys,” Katherine whispered back. “And that means we might step in some—”

“We’ll just have to dodge it,” Jonah insisted.

He tugged on her arm, pulling her out into the street with him. And it was easier to dodge the occasional car and carriage and horse dropping than all the people on the sidewalk. He had space to look around now too.

So this is Switzerland in the early nineteen hundreds?
he thought. He stared up at rows of neatly tended, interconnected buildings, all with window boxes at every window, overflowing with flowers.

Mom would love this,
Jonah thought.
She’d be saying, “Oh, it’s so picturesque! It’s beautiful!”

He swallowed a lump in his throat that he probably couldn’t blame on the dry bread he’d eaten without anything to drink. He never liked thinking about his parents when he was in a different time period, because those thoughts always had an echo:
What if I never see them again? What if this is the time period I get stuck in?

They had to get the Elucidator back from Mileva.

“There! We caught up with Albert and Mileva!” Katherine whispered, looking over to the sidewalk beside them. “They’re turning the corner—”

“We can’t lose them!” Jonah hissed. “Hurry!”

He grabbed Katherine’s arm and pulled her along with him. In the rush he forgot to watch the street beneath his feet.

Squish.

“Ugh, Jonah, did you just step in—”

“I’ll scrape it off. No big deal,” Jonah muttered back. He hurriedly rubbed the side of his dirty Nike against a bare spot in the street, but it wasn’t a perfect method. He could still smell a rather unpleasant odor rising from his shoe.

This is why people invented cars,
Jonah thought. He’d had a nasty encounter with horse manure in the fifteenth century too. It was kind of depressing that they were in the twentieth century now, and it was
still
a problem.

Jonah and Katherine managed to keep up with Albert and Mileva—and stay out of any more horse droppings—the rest of the way to the train station. It was a huge, cavernous building, and Mileva kept glancing around as if something in it frightened her.

Or is she looking for me and Katherine?
Jonah wondered.

She couldn’t be. They were invisible.

Albert and Mileva stood in line to buy a ticket, and then he walked her to her platform, with Jonah and Katherine right behind them. The train wasn’t there yet.

“You should go now,” Mileva said, touching her husband’s cheek. “You can’t be late for work.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Albert murmured. “I don’t want you to leave me.”

He drew her into a hug. Katherine leaned closer and sighed dramatically, as if she were watching some stupid romantic movie. Jonah wondered if he was going to have to look away.

But then Mileva pulled away from Albert.

“Albert—I have to do this,” she said. “I have to go. I couldn’t live with myself if—”

Albert touched a finger to her lips, silencing her.

“I know,” he said. He studied Mileva’s face, his expression oddly analytical, as if he were watching a lab experiment instead of saying good-bye to his wife. “I—I can’t say I understand. I think it’s different for fathers and mothers.”

“But—if you met her . . . ,” Mileva murmured. “Even just once . . .”

Jonah snapped his head toward Katherine, wondering if she’d heard the same crazy thing he had. Her eyes were
wide and distressed, and she was mouthing the word
What?

Jonah shook his head. Things were even worse than he thought. It wasn’t just time that was messed up. It was Einstein’s family.

How could Albert Einstein never have met his own daughter?

The train arrived a few moments later, and Mileva struggled into the nearest car. She sat by a window and waved and waved and waved to Albert.

Jonah and Katherine had to wait until the crush of people in front of them boarded before they could step in.

“Maybe it will be so crowded we’ll have to ride on the top of the train,” Jonah suggested hopefully to Katherine. He’d seen movies where people did this, and it always looked like a lot of fun.

“You’re crazy,” Katherine told him. “Besides, we have to keep an eye on Mileva. Something’s really off, you know?”

No kidding,
Jonah thought.

“And what if some moment on the train is our only chance to get the Elucidator back?” Katherine asked.

Jonah hated it when Katherine was right.

Getting onto the train and staying near Mileva was even harder than Jonah expected. Just walking down the aisle without touching someone was like walking a tightrope. All the seats were taken, so at first Jonah and Katherine tried standing in the aisle near Mileva’s seat. But other people kept walking up and down the aisle: the ticket taker, a bunch of squirmy little kids, the little kids’ mother chasing them, and then travelers getting on and off at every stop. Jonah and Katherine constantly had to scurry out of the way to the end of the train car, press themselves against the wall so nobody touched them, and then hurry back so they didn’t miss anything with Mileva.

“I’m not going to be able to stand this for another minute, let alone all the way to Zurich and wherever else we’re going,” Katherine said after they’d had to squeeze themselves tightly against the wall to avoid being hit by a large man’s protruding stomach. He’d come within a button’s width of brushing Jonah’s arm.

“So you do want to ride on top of the train,” Jonah said.

“No,”
Katherine said emphatically. She looked at her brother, then squinted thoughtfully toward Mileva’s seat. “But maybe . . . Spot me.”

Tugging Jonah along with her, she went back down the aisle to Mileva’s row.

Holding first on to Jonah’s shoulder, then the overhead
luggage rack, she climbed onto the back of the row of seats opposite Mileva’s. The people sitting there—a man in a fancy suit and a woman in a lacy blouse—must have felt the pressure on the seats, because they both looked around curiously. But, seeing nothing unusual behind or above them, then they only shrugged and went back to facing forward.

Still holding on to the luggage rack for balance, Katherine tucked her legs under her body so she was half sitting, half crouching sideways on the top of the seats.

She pointed triumphantly at her own pose and then at Jonah, clearly trying to say,
See? My idea worked! Now it’s your turn.

Jonah rolled his eyes, but he started gingerly trying to climb onto the back of the row Mileva was in. It was a little harder for him because he didn’t have anyone’s shoulder to hang on to. He couldn’t reach the luggage rack from the aisle, so he resorted to stepping onto the seat between Mileva and the elderly woman sitting beside her. It was only for an instant, and he made sure that his shoe didn’t touch either one of them.

Seconds later he, like Katherine, had reached a precarious perch atop the seat.

He looked at Katherine, and she was frowning and pointing at the seat where he’d stepped.

A small pile of dried mud clumps—
er, no, dried manure
, he
thought—lay on the seat below him. It had clearly fallen off his shoe, and turned visible again once it was apart from him. In fact, the clumps were practically arranged in a shoe-shaped pattern.

Jonah shrugged and shook his head and mouthed back to Katherine,
That doesn’t matter. No one’s going to notice.

But Mileva was already turning her head and looking down at the mud clumps. She looked carefully at the woman beside her, looked all around the train, frowned thoughtfully, and then brushed the mud away.

See?
Jonah mouthed to Katherine.
No problem.

What’s she looking at now?
Katherine mouthed back to him. At least that’s what Jonah thought she was trying to say, because she pointed down at Mileva’s lap and, in a questioning way, held up the hand that wasn’t clinging to the luggage rack.

Jonah looked down.

Mileva had pulled something out of her bag, something in a dark paper frame.

It was the picture of Lieserl that had been hidden in the desk’s secret compartment back at the Einsteins’ home.

That’s what she was doing, standing over by the desk right before we left. So it’s okay for that picture to be seen on a train, but not in their own apartment?
Jonah wondered.
What does that mean?

He tried to mouth,
It’s the picture,
to Katherine, but she
didn’t understand and kept mouthing back,
What? What?

Finally Jonah just mouthed,
I’ll tell you later,
and went back to watching Mileva.

She was studying the picture as if trying to memorize every detail.

“What a lovely child,” the old woman beside her said. Or maybe she wasn’t that old—she just had white hair and was wearing an old-fashioned dark dress. (
Duh,
Jonah thought.
Everything’s old-fashioned in the past.
)

He was pretty sure that this woman hadn’t been sitting there since Bern, but had gotten on at one of the smaller stations.

Mileva jolted back, as if she hadn’t realized that the older woman was looking in her direction.

Still, she nodded politely.

“Thank you,” Mileva said quietly. She looked around once more, and then added, “It’s my daughter. Lieserl.”

There was something odd about the way she said that. Jonah had heard his own parents talk about him and Katherine a million times: “Yeah, we have two kids,” “Yeah, those two little monkeys are ours,” “That was our son who just scored that goal!” “Looks like we have to claim the one who’s covered in the most mud” . . . and whether they sounded proud or embarrassed by what he and Katherine were doing at that particular moment, there was always
something offhand in their voices, some easy assumption that they completely took for granted.

Why did Mileva sound as if she were doing something very daring, just saying, “It’s my daughter”?

The woman beside her didn’t seem to notice anything unusual.

“How old is she?” she asked.

“She was fifteen months when this picture was taken,” Mileva said. “She’s nineteen months now.”

Really?
Jonah thought. He looked over at Katherine to see if she’d caught that bit of information.

She had. She was leaning forward, intent on Mileva’s every word.

“Oh, they change so fast at that age,” the old woman said.

“Yes, I—I’m going home to see her,” Mileva said. “I miss her so much. She’s been staying with my parents until . . . until . . .”

So that’s where Lieserl is,
Jonah thought.
That’s where we’re going.

He looked over at Katherine again, and she was leaning so far forward that it was a wonder she hadn’t fallen off her seat.

The old woman next to Mileva was in a similarly eager pose.

“Until?” she prompted.

Something in Mileva’s face closed down.

“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind. My husband and I just have to work out a . . . a situation.”

“At least you
have
a husband,” the old woman said, in a way that implied she wasn’t quite sure she believed Mileva. “So many girls nowadays get themselves into trouble, having babies without—”

“Of course I have a husband!” Mileva said, a bit too shrilly. “I have a husband, but we’ve had such bad luck, and now my little girl is sick, and . . . ”

“Oh, you poor dear,” the old woman said, patting Mileva’s shoulder in a way that Jonah thought was more creepy than comforting. “Tell me all about it.”

Jonah didn’t exactly
mean
to kick the woman in the head at that precise moment, but he didn’t quite mind it. His left foot slipped off the top of the seat, sliding down and knocking the woman’s velvet hat askew.

“What was that?” the woman cried, looking all around. She turned and felt behind herself on the seat back, but by then Jonah had managed to scamper away, pressing himself between the luggage rack and the top of Mileva’s seat.

“There’s something wrong with my seat,” the woman told Mileva indignantly. “I’m going to inform the conductor.”

She stood up and rushed away, leaving behind a tracer version of herself leaning vulture-like toward Mileva.

Now Mileva looked around too.

“I don’t know how you did that,” she murmured. “But thank you.”

Her words were so soft that Katherine and the man and woman sitting nearby couldn’t possibly have heard. Mileva might have been praying. She might have been talking to herself or to Lieserl’s picture or to some saint Jonah had never heard of who protected people from nosy old women on trains.

But Jonah knew: She was really talking to him.

Time travel had put Jonah in the middle of a battle in 1485, and in the middle of a mutiny and in danger of freezing or starving to death in 1611. He’d faced a potentially fatal bear attack on that trip too.

So on the trains rattling across Switzerland—and then Germany and Austria—Jonah kept telling himself that things could be worse. The scenery was actually kind of amazing: mountains and more mountains, some of them capped in snow even though the air in the train cars was so hot that Jonah was pretty sure that it was summertime right now.

But it was tedious and uncomfortable, crouching and standing and sitting and huddling and cowering on one train after another, for hours on end. His muscles ached from the crouching-above-seats position he and Katherine
had to assume whenever the train cars were crowded. His stomach ached from the minimal, questionable food they managed to pick up—mostly leftovers abandoned in train-station restaurants, which Katherine at first refused to eat and then, when she got hungrier, began gobbling down as eagerly as Jonah. And he worried every time he stepped off a train for a transfer that this would be the station where they lost Mileva completely, and they’d have to find their way to Novi Sad—wherever that was—on their own.