Running Out of Time

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  If Ray Bradbury had written The Giver, the result might rival Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time. It’s a cliffhanger about the danger of utopias that makes a very contemporary point: that even when the adults can find a place to hide, their children can’t.

  —Richard Peck

  Top-notch suspense with twists and turns that grab at the heart— Running Out of Time is a highly imaginative, absolutely terrific first novel.

  —-Joan Lowery Nixon

  Running Out of Time has a knockout concept that is wonderfully developed. I enjoyed the book enormously. What a terrific debut for Margaret Peterson Haddix!

  —Bruce Coville

  “I may have to ask you to do something very dangerous,” Ma said.

  Jessie’s mother is desperate, for the children of Clifton are dying, and in 1840, there is no medicine to help them. This leads her to reveal an enormous secret to Jessie: It is actually 1996, and they are living in a reconstructed village that serves as a tourist site. She asks Jessie to do something that will put her life in jeopardy: to escape into the outside world to get help, before the children run out of time.

  This revelation turns the world as Jessie knows it upside down. Her odyssey becomes a gripping page-turner that combines the fascination of a mystery, the power of historical fiction, and the wonderment of science fiction. Like Jessie, who must come to terms with a world she has never known, readers of Running Out of Time are challenged to look at their own world in a new way.

  Margaret Peterson Haddix makes her stunning debut as a novelist with this unusual book that will leave readers on the edge of their seats.

  A JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION

  MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX

  grew up on a farm outside Washington Court House, Ohio, and graduated from Miami University (of Ohio) with a bachelor’s degree in history, creative writing, and journalism. After college, she worked as a reporter at Indianapolis News. Ms. Haddix now writes full-time at her home in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, Doug, and two children, Meredith and Connor. Running Out of Time is her first novel.

  Jacket illustration by Jane Sterrett

  Copyright © 1995 by Simon & Schuster

  Jacket design by Paul Zakris

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  RUNNING OUT OF TIME

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York, 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

  is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.

  Designed by Paul Zakris

  The text for this book is set in 12-point American Garamond.

  15 16 17 18 19 20

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haddix, Margaret Peterson.

  Running out of time / by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When a diphtheria epidemic hits her 1840 village, thirteen-year-old Jessie

  discovers it is actually a 1996 tourist site under unseen observation by heartless scientists, and

  it’s up to Jessie to escape the village and save the lives of the dying children.

  ISBN 0-689-80084-3

  ISBN-13: 978-1-44246-129-1 (eBook)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Indiana—Fiction. 3. Diphtheria—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H1164Ru 1995 [Fic]—dc20 95-8459

  To Doug, and in memory of Myrtle Peterson

  With thanks to Marilee Peterson, Dr. K. W. Chan, and Creg Stockwell for help with medical and pharmaceutical information.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ONE

  The light woke Jessie, though it was just a glimmer downstairs. She eased out of bed, being careful not to disturb her sister Hannah.

  “Ma?” Jessie whispered by the ladder down from the loft.

  In a few moments, her mother’s tired face appeared below, illuminated by a flickering candle.

  “It’s the Bentons,” she said. “Caleb says both Sally and Betsy are sick.”

  Everybody called Jessie’s mother “the midwife,” but she did a lot more than deliver babies. In Clifton, anyone who got sick at night called on her. Most people, Jessie thought, seemed to wait until dark to get sick, so they wouldn’t have to go to Dr. Fister. Dr. Fister always gave prescriptions like “Make a poultice of chokeberries and rub it on your neck three times a day.” He made a real show of it. He used to slip a packet of pills under the table, too—pills that really worked. Anymore, though, he just gave the folk remedy. Jessie hadn’t seen any of the pills in a long time.

  “Can I come and help?” Jessie asked Ma.

  “I don’t want you catching anything….”

  Jessie gave her mother what Pa called “that pitiful please look,” and she relented.

  “All right. You can carry my bag. But I don’t want you coming inside until I find out what Sally and Betsy have.”

  Jessie pulled her dress off the nail by her bed and yanked it over her head. Then she scrambled down the ladder and took her boots from beside the door. She was ready by the time Ma finished dressing. Grown women had to worry about clothing more than thirteen-year-old girls did. That was one reason Jessie was glad she wasn’t entirely grown-up yet.

  Ma unlatched the door and they slipped out into the warm April night.

  “Hannah and the boys never even moved!” Jessie said.

  Ma smiled.

  “They could sleep through a blizzard. You’re my light sleeper. You’re always afraid you might miss something.”

  Jessie grinned. It did seem like an adventure being out in the middle of the night. The village looked spooky with only moonlight and the faint glow of Ma’s lantern. Shadows flickered on the path and in the surrounding woods. The main buildings of Clifton loomed like hulking animals. Jessie shivered passing the three trees in the square that everyone said were haunted.

  “Did Caleb go on home?” Jessie asked. Caleb Benton was ten, but he was the biggest chicken in Clifton School. “I bet he was scared—“

  “His ma didn’t want him to wait,” Ma said.

  Jessie waited for Ma to say more, but she didn’t. Usually when Jessie convinced Ma to let her go along on these night trips, Ma and Jessie talked all the way: about the symptoms Ma knew and how she planned to treat them, or about Jessie’s schoolwork, or about just anything. But tonight Ma seemed barely aware that Jessie was with her. Ma stepped silently, her face shadowed. Jessie thought Ma might just be tired. This was the fourth night in a row she had been called out. Ma hadn’t let Jessie go the other times.

  They passed the school, the general sto
re, and Dr. Fister’s clapboard house. Jessie couldn’t understand how the doctor could afford a clapboard house, when no one went to him. Jessie’s pa was the blacksmith, and he was always busy. Yet Jessie’s family still lived in the log cabin they’d built back in 1828, when they first came to Clifton. Jessie had hinted more than once that they needed a new house, now that there were six children. After all, she said, little Katie was soon going to outgrow the trundle bed that slipped under Ma and Pa’s bed downstairs. Where was Katie going to sleep then?

  Pa always answered that a new house was too expensive, with the whole country in a depression. He didn’t seem to mind. Hannah whispered that Pa liked the log cabin too much to build a house.

  Hannah was just a year older than Jessie, but she said she could remember when they built the cabin. All the men in the village helped lay the maple logs, one on top of another, and then the women filled the cracks with mud. Jessie had seen other cabins built—had helped, even—and thought Hannah might just be confused. Even Hannah couldn’t remember before, when they’d lived in Pennsylvania. Jessie wished she could remember the trip out to Indiana, when she and Hannah and Ma and Pa had traveled down the Ohio River in a flatboat. Sometimes she could get Pa to tell about it. Ma never would.

  “Be careful,” Ma said as Jessie tripped over a root in the path.

  “It’s hard to see,” Jessie said. The moon was behind a cloud now.

  Ma nodded and moved the lantern closer to Jessie. They were almost to the Bentons’ cabin.

  “Do you think Sally and Betsy will be all right?” Jessie asked. Sally was prissy, kind of like Hannah, but Betsy was always fun to play with.

  “I hope so,” Ma said, in a way that made Jessie worry. A lot of children were sick: Jefferson Webster, Susan Seward, Abby and James Harlow. Jessie knew it wasn’t just the usual spring chills and fevers. There were too many empty seats at school.

  “Wait here,” Ma said, pointing to a stump in front of the Bentons’ cabin. She gave Jessie the lantern and knocked lightly on the door. It opened immediately. Jessie caught a glimpse of Mrs. Benton, crying. Mrs. Benton was a tall woman with rough hands. Jessie had never seen her cry.

  Jessie went to the Bentons’ oilpaper window, but she could see only shapes moving. The Ma shape seemed to be bent over the bed downstairs. They must have put Sally and Betsy in Mr. and Mrs. Benton’s bed. That was serious.

  The Bentons and Ma talked in such low voices Jessie couldn’t hear anything. And she’d get in trouble if they knew she was trying to listen. She sat down on the stump, placing the lantern on the ground in front of her. She should put it out, to save the oil, but it was a comfort. Everyone said bears and wolves stayed away from fire. All sorts of rustling noises came from the woods beyond the Bentons’ cabin.

  Normally Jessie wasn’t scared of wild animals. She was braver than anybody; she took more dangerous dares than the boys at school. But all this sickness and the way Ma was acting worried her. Jessie wished someone would explain what had happened to Dr. Fister’s pills. Even when he’d had them, people pretended they didn’t exist. But they always worked. Why weren’t there pills for Betsy, Sally, and the others?

  It was another mystery of Clifton, Jessie thought, like the haunted trees.

  Once, when Jessie was little, she’d noticed a box at the top of one of the haunted trees. It was painted the same color as the branches, but it held a piece of glass that sometimes glinted in the sunlight. The box moved constantly, even when there wasn’t a breeze. Jessie had been so curious that she started climbing the tree. She’d only gotten her right leg up on a branch when Mr. Seward ran out of his store and ordered her down. At first, Jessie thought it was funny to see the big man run. But she didn’t laugh long. Mr. Seward spanked her, hard, and then Pa spanked her when she got home. Both of them shushed her whenever she tried to say something about the box.

  After that, the box disappeared and was replaced by a piece of glass in one of the limbs. Jessie never told anyone she saw it. But she would have loved to look at it up close.

  The thing was, neither Mr. Seward nor Pa had seemed surprised when Jessie told them about the box. Did adults everywhere have so many secrets, or was it just in Clifton? Except when she was a baby, Jessie had never been any farther away from Clifton than a few miles up the hill to pick blackberries. So she had no way of knowing. Only, the adults in Clifton seemed to be acting more and more strangely lately. They’d confer in whispers, then pretend nothing was going on. Pa had told Jessie that everyone was worried about the depression, which started back in 1837 and didn’t seem to have an end in sight.

  Jessie could understand people being worried about that—Pa said even the state had gone bankrupt. But she still suspected the adults were whispering about something else. What could it be?

  Sometimes Jessie wanted to be an adult right away, so she could learn all the secrets. And sometimes she never wanted to grow up.

  Jessie giggled, thinking of the fight she’d had just that day with Hannah. Hannah said the only reason to grow up was to get married and have children.

  “Who wants to cook and clean all day? I’m going to be a doctor,” Jessie had said.

  “There’s no such thing as a woman doctor,” Hannah said.

  “I’ll be the first, then!”

  Hannah laughed at her, so Jessie teased her about being in love with Chester Seward. Was she ever mad about that! It was true, though. And Chester never even looked at Hannah. Jessie had overheard Hannah ask Ma if she would be an old maid if she wasn’t married by sixteen, like Mr. Seward said. Hannah could be so stupid. Jessie wouldn’t care if she never got married.

  “Jessie?”

  Ma was out the Bentons’ door now. Jessie stood and picked up the lantern.

  “Can I help, Ma?”

  “We need to go out to the woods to pick some, uh, herbs.”

  It made no sense—they had every herb imaginable dried and hanging from the rafters at home. But Ma had a strange look on her face that told Jessie not to ask questions. Behind her, Mr. Benton came out and nailed a paper sign to the door. It had one word that Jessie could barely make out in the light: QUARANTINE.

  “What’s a quarantine?” Jessie asked. It looked like the kind of word Mr. Smythe, the schoolmaster, would put on the eighth-grade spelling list. But Jessie had never seen it.

  “It’s a word to let people know there’s a dangerous disease inside, so they should stay away,” Ma said. “Mr. Benton’s going to tell the Websters and the Harlows to put out signs, too.”

  “Not the Sewards?”

  Ma shook her head and put her finger to her lips. Another secret.

  Ma and Jessie walked into the woods in silence. They passed plenty of herbs, but Jessie decided not to ask what they were looking for. Ma was acting too strangely.

  Finally they stopped beside a huge rock that Jessie and her friends had played King of the Mountain on, before it was forbidden. Ma bent down at the base of the rock. There was nothing but dirt there, but she motioned for Jessie to crouch, too.

  Then, when Jessie had doubled over, her cheek pressed against the cold rock, Ma began to whisper.

  “I may have to ask you to do something very dangerous,” Ma said.

  Jessie felt a chill.

  “What?”

  Ma shook her head impatiently.

  “You can’t ask questions now. We may be able to avoid it. The signs may work.”

  A thousand questions came to Jessie’s mind, but she obediently pushed them away. Ma smiled, grimly.

  “After school tomorrow, I want you to tell everyone you have to look for more herbs. Don’t let anyone come with you. I’ll meet you here as soon as it’s dark.”

  “Why?” Jessie couldn’t help asking.

  “I’ll tell you then. If I’m not here, everything’s fine and you can just go home.”

  “But—“

  “It’s important that you do exactly what I say. And don’t tell anyone.”

  None of it made sen
se, but Jessie nodded. Then Ma turned away. She picked a few leaves without even looking to see what they were.

  TWO

  “Wake up, sleepyhead!”

  Jessie groaned. How could it be morning already? But Hannah was standing over the bed, all dressed, her brown hair neatly braided and wrapped around her head. Even in the uncertain light of the loft, Jessie could tell by her sister’s red cheeks that Hannah had scrubbed her face hard enough for both of them.

  “You’re not going to have time for chores if you don’t hurry up,” Hannah said. “I don’t know why some people need years of sleep.”

  Jessie started to answer that “some people” had done more interesting things than sleep all night, but then she stopped. No one was allowed to mention Ma’s midnight rounds during the day. It was another secret, though everyone knew about it.

  Jessie sat up and remembered that last night was doubly secret. What was the “something very dangerous” that Ma wanted her to do?

  Jessie had done pretty much everything dangerous there was to do in Clifton, she thought, without being killed. On a dare, she’d walked a fallen oak tree across Crooked Creek last May when it was flooded. Everyone was sure she’d fall off and drown in the speeding water. But Ma wasn’t supposed to know about that. Jessie had also talked Pa into letting her help him shoe Mr. Meders’s wild horse once, and the horse had reared and kicked his hooves at her. But Pa had pushed her out of the way then. Jessie couldn’t imagine either of her parents actually putting her in danger.

  “Jessie—” Ma called from downstairs.

  “Coming,” Jessie said.

  Hannah flashed her an “I told you so” look and disappeared down the ladder. Jessie thought about throwing her brush at Hannah, but didn’t want to take the time to pick it up. And she would get in trouble. Hannah would see to it.

  Jessie got out of bed and pulled her dress on, no more carefully than she had the night before. The dress was a threadbare woolen that had originally been Ma’s; it was cut down for Hannah and then passed on to Jessie when Hannah became too stout. Jessie didn’t think it was fair that she still had to wear Hannah’s old clothes. Jessie was an inch taller. It wasn’t her fault Hannah was fatter. But people in Clifton didn’t care about a girl’s ankle showing a little. She’d heard Ma and the other women say it was a scandalous thing back East, but on the frontier people had other things to worry about.