Caught (Missing)

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

His mind kept replaying everything that had happened since the moment they’d arrived in the Einsteins’ time—no, since time itself had frozen back in the twenty-first century. What should he and Katherine have done differently?

  Not lost Chip and Angela. Not let Mileva see the Elucidator. Stayed hidden better . . .

  He remembered a Bible passage that he’d heard in church, usually during confession—something like, I did the things I shouldn’t have done; I didn’t do the things I ought to have.

  That fit.

  Still, he couldn’t make himself regret everything. Kicking the gossipy woman in the head, for instance. Or helping Mileva carry her bag through the Vienna train station.

  But what good was anything nice I did for Mileva, if I’m just going to help make it so she probably won’t ever see her daughter again? Jonah wondered. I don’t mean her harm but—how can I not hurt her?

  Maybe he should just concentrate on watching for tracers, and trying to make sure that time stayed as close to its original version as possible. He was sure he’d done things all day long that had created extra tracers, but he hadn’t paid very close attention. He hated watching for tracers—they just made him feel guilty.

  Like now. Over by the window, Mileva was awash in tracer lights. In original time, it seemed, she was supposed to have fallen asleep over Albert’s papers and the picture of Lieserl. Her tracer lay sprawled in her seat, disturbed only by an occasional grimace that probably just meant she was having bad dreams.

  But the real Mileva was still wide awake, sitting upright and poking and prodding the Elucidator, muttering under her breath.

  What if she broke it?

  What if she figured it out?

  She seemed smart—maybe not Albert Einstein smart, but determined and strong-willed enough to possibly make up the difference.

  Jonah wished he could shut his own brain off entirely.

  Hours passed. Eventually Katherine kicked him, and Jonah realized that, whether he’d managed to sleep or not, the night was coming to an end. Dim light crept in through the window, and Jonah could just barely make out lumps in the near-darkness that might be buildings outside. They seemed to be in a city again—was it Budapest?

  Jonah had already forgotten that Katherine had kicked him. She seemed to be trying again to get his attention—jarring his shoulder this time.

  “Mileva’s writing something,” Katherine hissed in his ear. “Can you lean over without her knowing and make sure it’s not anything about the Elucidator or us?”

  Jonah nodded silently. He leaned just far enough that he could see the words on the card in Mileva’s lap:

  Dear Johnnie,

  I’m already in Budapest. It’s going quickly, but badly. I’m not feeling well at all. What are you up to, little Johnnie? Write me soon, okay?

  Your poor

  Dollie

  Mileva moved her hand, and Jonah realized she was adding a date in the top right corner: August 27, 190 . . . Before he could quite read the last digit, she was folding the letter and slipping it into an envelope. No portion of her body glowed with tracer light, so Jonah knew that nothing she was doing had been changed by contact with him and Katherine.

  “It’s not about us,” Jonah whispered back to Katherine. “It’s just a love letter to Albert.”

  Now, why had he called it that? There hadn’t been a single “I love you” or “I miss you” in the whole letter. But it was as if every word had that as its secret meaning.

  For the first time since they’d left the twenty-first century, Jonah let himself think about Andrea, the girl he’d had a crush on ever since their trip to 1600. He didn’t like remembering the “let’s just be friends” talk she’d given him when they got back to the twenty-first century. But he could see writing a letter to her—or, well, a text message or e-mail, anyhow—almost like Mileva’s.

  Dear Andrea,

  I’m in 190—well, something. I can’t tell how this trip is going, because I can’t figure anything out. But how are you? Are you frozen like everyone else in the twenty-first century? Or are you somewhere worrying about me? If you could, would you let me know how you are? And . . .

  Katherine jostled Jonah’s shoulder again.

  “You’re not going to make fun of love letters?” she asked incredulously. “Have you actually grown up, or something?”

  “I haven’t gotten enough sleep to do anything,” Jonah mumbled.

  The train stopped, and Mileva got out, mailed her letter—and vomited once again. Jonah hoped scarlet fever wasn’t terribly contagious, or that it was one of those diseases that he and Katherine had been vaccinated against as infants.

  The rest of the day passed in a sleep-deprived blur of waiting in train stations and waiting on trains. Finally, in the late afternoon, Jonah heard the conductor walking through the train car calling out, “Next stop, Novi Sad. Novi Sad, next stop.”

  Jonah looked out the window at acres and acres of farm fields turning brown in the August sun. It was as if all the mountains they’d seen back in Switzerland and Germany and Austria had been ironed out flat. He nudged Katherine beside him.

  “This is going to be like Little House on the Prairie,” he whispered. “The prairie part, anyway.”

  But when the train pulled into Novi Sad, it was a bunch of old, elegant buildings, not American-style frontier shacks.

  Jonah’s mom would have called this place picturesque too.

  Mileva had sent a telegram from the last station, so there was a carriage waiting for her when they arrived. An older man in a formal outfit met her at the platform and took her bag from her.

  He hugged her and murmured into her hair, “My baby’s come home,” so Jonah guessed that this was her father, not some servant.

  Mileva hugged him back—quickly—and then held him at arm’s length and watched his face as she asked, “How is she? Is she any better?”

  The man’s face turned grim.

  “She’s very sick,” he said. “It is good that you’re here, with all your scientific knowledge.”

  “You know I studied physics, not medicine,” Mileva said impatiently. “You know I am no good at—”

  “Your papa will always think you are good at everything, no matter what,” the man said. “The best.”

  Jonah and Katherine couldn’t figure out how to climb into the carriage without spooking the horses or alerting Mileva’s father—as well as Mileva—to their presence. So the best they could do was just jog alongside the carriage.

  Mileva looked around as soon as she had settled into the carriage seat.

  “It is good that our house is not far,” she said, speaking more loudly than she needed to if she meant the words only for her father’s ears.

  Still, Jonah was winded—and trying desperately not to draw attention to himself by panting—when the carriage finally stopped in front of an imposing house on what seemed to be the nicest street in town.

  “We—huff—can’t—huff—follow right—huff—behind them,” Katherine whispered to him. “Not—huff—until we—huff—catch our breath.”

  “Right,” Jonah agreed. “Let’s just—huff—dodge around the side of the house . . . ”

  People were pouring out the front door, crying out, “Mileva!” and, “She’s here!” Jonah held his breath and detoured around them. Once he turned the corner, he let himself take in huge gulps of air.

  “Feeling . . . better now,” Katherine mumbled, leaning over to get deeper breaths. “Not going to . . . pass out . . . after all.”

  Jonah reminded himself that they should still be cautious, even though everyone from the house seemed to be standing in the street out front, greeting Mileva. He peered down the side of the building. Filmy curtains blew out a window, the breeze tangling them into odd shapes.

  Then Jonah realized it wasn’t the breeze doing that: There were two men climbing through the curtains—two men who were almost completely see-through.

  Time travelers, Jonah thought excitedly. J
B? Hadley?

  Jonah caught a glimpse of the men’s faces. He saw what they were doing, who they were carrying.

  These men weren’t JB and Hadley, Jonah’s friends. They were Gary and Hodge, his enemies.

  And Gary and Hodge were in the midst of kidnapping Lieserl Einstein.

  EIGHTEEN

  Stop! Jonah started to yell. He turned, ready to run toward Gary and Hodge, ready to tackle them and wrestle little Lieserl out of their hands if he had to.

  But something tugged him backward—Katherine’s hand. And she clapped her other hand over his mouth, cutting off his shout at “St—”

  This completely confused Jonah. He froze. Katherine yanked him around the corner of the house, back to the front, where everyone was clustered around Mileva.

  “What’d you do that for?” he demanded, struggling against her grip. “Didn’t you see who that was? They’re kidnapping Lieserl! Mileva’s going to go into her little girl’s room and she’ll have vanished and—”

  “But—think!” Katherine commanded, her face twisting in distress. “We know Gary and Hodge really did kidnap Lieserl Einstein. They do. Otherwise, how could she be one of the missing kids? What if this is meant to happen? And—if you let them see you, then they’ll recognize you back in our time, in the cave. We can’t even try to stop them, because, I guess, we didn’t already do that. If we had, as soon as Gary and Hodge saw us at that adoption conference, they would have recognized us. They would have said, ‘Hey, we remember you!’”

  Jonah stared at his sister. He thought about complaining that he couldn’t understand anything she was saying when she kept switching around verb tenses like that. But it was time travel confusing him, not Katherine. It just didn’t make sense that the twenty-first century adoption conference where Jonah and Katherine would meet the other missing children of history had already happened for them, but was still in the future for Gary and Hodge and little Lieserl.

  The past is the future is our past is their future is . . . Crud, how can I figure out the right thing to do? he wondered. What if a “right thing” isn’t even possible?

  “At least I’m going to watch them,” Jonah told Katherine stubbornly. “I’m going to watch, and if they do anything to hurt Lieserl—”

  “They’re not going to hurt her,” Katherine muttered. “They’re planning to make a bajillion dollars selling her to some family in the future who wants a kid with Albert Einstein’s DNA. They don’t have any reason to hurt her.”

  “Still,” Jonah said stubbornly.

  Katherine bit her lip, but she didn’t try to stop him when he crouched down and slipped back around the corner. Instead she followed him.

  Both of them stayed low to the ground and tight against the building. They were lucky that a stand of tall grass hid them from the window where Gary and Hodge were climbing out. But Jonah and Katherine could peek through the grass.

  The two men seemed not to have heard Jonah’s brief “St—.” It must have been completely covered by the noise of the family greeting Mileva out front.

  Gary jumped down to the ground and glanced past Jonah and Katherine toward the ruckus out in the street.

  “Sounds like a party,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to stay and sample some of the time-native treats? Secretly, of course.”

  “Eh, it’s just one of the family members getting back,” Hodge replied, even as he handed the toddler Lieserl down to Gary. She was wrapped in a blanket and seemed to be asleep—or drugged. “Time-primitives celebrate the stupidest things. You know that. And the food’s never as good as the nutrition tourists like to make it sound.”

  Jonah looked over at Katherine and shook his head angrily. How could Gary and Hodge be so casual about everything? How could they not even know—or care—that the “family member” who’d just arrived was the mother of the child they were taking away? A mother who would soon be walking into an empty nursery, and crying out, and . . .

  Jonah clenched his fists.

  Katherine put a warning hand on Jonah’s arm, and pointed.

  “Remember Gary’s muscles?” she hissed in his ear.

  Jonah grimaced, staring at his enemy’s bulging, muscular arms. It was true that back in the time cave Jonah had had no prayer of overpowering Gary. In fact he’d lost every time whenever it came down to strength and prowess.

  But he didn’t want Katherine reminding him of that.

  I could still outsmart him, Jonah thought. I kind of did that before.

  Of course, he’d also had a lot of help from JB and Angela and the other kids.

  Gary was looking down at the child in his arms with a disgusted expression on his face.

  “I don’t know why we didn’t just take her time-forward directly from the house,” he said. “No one would have seen us.”

  “With a kid who’s worth as much as that one, you take a few extra precautions,” Hodge said. He jumped to the ground beside Gary and took Lieserl from him.

  “Yes, sir,” Gary said mockingly. “That’s why I’m looking around so carefully in case any time agents are watching us.”

  He began walking away from the window, with his hand on his brow in a mocking imitation of someone on the lookout for spies.

  But he was walking right toward Jonah and Katherine.

  Jonah ducked down close to the ground and reached over and pulled Katherine’s head down, too.

  “Should we run?” Katherine whispered into Jonah’s ear.

  “He’d hear us,” Jonah whispered back. “He’d see us.”

  Jonah didn’t dare to look back up. What if Gary heard or saw them anyway? What would that do to time? Would it mess everything up?

  No—more important question—what would Gary do to us? How badly would he mess up our faces?

  Jonah’s heart pounded. He could hear Gary’s footsteps coming closer . . . closer . . . closer . . .

  Back in Hodge’s arms Lieserl coughed, and the sound turned into the beginning of a thin, agonizing wail.

  “Quit your clowning around, and let’s get out of here,” Hodge commanded. “This kid’s not worth anything to us if she dies. Look at her—she needs an antibiotic drip, stat.”

  Jonah heard Gary’s footfalls recede, back toward Hodge and the window.

  “I hate germy kids,” Gary complained, and his voice was more distant now.

  Jonah dared to peek through the grass again. Hodge was holding the blanket near Lieserl’s face, muffling the sound of her cries. Gary, standing beside him, seemed to be consulting a compass.

  No, Jonah thought. Programming an Elucidator.

  It was now or never. If Jonah was going to do anything to interfere with Lieserl’s kidnapping, he had to do it now.

  He started to rise up—but Hodge’s voice stopped him.

  “This one’s lucky we’re taking her,” he said. “A kid this sick, no way she’d survive if we left her here.”

  Jonah blinked. And in that instant Gary, Hodge, and Lieserl all vanished.

  NINETEEN

  Jonah let his body do what he’d almost done in the moment before Gary and Hodge disappeared. He jumped up and ran to the spot under the open window where the two men had been standing only a split second earlier.

  “No!” he cried, waving his arms uselessly, as though he still thought he could catch them. “No! How could we have let that happen!”

  “Jonah, shh,” Katherine said beside him. “We had to. Don’t make a scene. You’ll just make things worse. They’ll hear us in the front.”

  Jonah stood still for a second—and realized that the noise coming from the street out front had stopped.

  “Mileva’s about to see—,” he began, and couldn’t even finish the sentence. He turned around and gripped the bottom of the window frame Gary and Hodge had climbed out.

  “Jonah, wait—,” Katherine began.

  Jonah ignored her and hoisted himself up on the frame. He pulled first one leg then the other across the sill, and slid down into the house.

/>   He was in a dim, muffled room. The curtains were drawn on all four of the other windows, and the door was shut. A bit of light glowed from a low wooden bed. Jonah tiptoed closer—it was Lieserl’s tracer on the bed, a tracer blanket kicked to the side.

  But Mileva won’t even see the tracer of her daughter when she comes in, Jonah thought. She’ll just see that she’s gone.

  He heard a voice outside the door saying, “She’s in your old room . . . ,” and he took a step back from the bed, bumping into Katherine, who’d evidently climbed in through the window behind him.

  “Watch where you’re going, stu—,” Katherine began, but then she stopped. Her eyes widened in surprise, and she whispered, “Who’s that?”

  Jonah followed his sister’s gaze, staring back toward the bed again.

  Just in the moment Jonah had spent glancing away, a girl had appeared beside the bed. She had long, wavy dark hair.

  And she seemed to be wearing blue jeans.

  “Is that—,” Katherine began. The girl turned around, her face pale in the dim glow from the tracer Lieserl. “Emily?” Katherine asked. “Emily from the time cave back home?”

  The girl—Emily?—squinted.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, almost as if she were apologizing.

  It was Emily. Emily was one of the missing kids from history stranded in the twenty-first century. Jonah had met her in the time cave where Gary and Hodge had herded them all together when the two men were trying to re-kidnap them.

  So if Emily’s here now . . . that must mean her original identity was Lieserl Einstein, Jonah thought, trying to get his brain to catch up. JB already told us he’d sent the real Lieserl back in time—we’ve just seen and heard things all out of sequence. We saw the teenage Emily in the twenty-first century and then we heard that JB had sent her back in time and then we saw Gary and Hodge kidnap her in the first place. And now we’re seeing her return.

  This was like one of those stupid language arts activities his teachers had been so fond of back in elementary school: Put the story in order. What happened first? What happened second? What happened third? What’s the end?