Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “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?

  THIRTEEN

  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 Eluci
dator. She was showing them that she still had the Elucidator.

  FOURTEEN

  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.

  “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?

  FIFTEEN

  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.