Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  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.

  SIXTEEN

  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.

  He worried, too, that they might never get the Elucidator back or that Mileva might even lose it as she limped unsteadily from platform to platform, dragging her bag along with her.

  Once, in Vienna, he gave in to an impulse and lifted the back end of her bag behind her, to make it lighter for her to carry.

  “Jonah! You can’t do that!” Katherine scolded him in a whisper. “I mean, I know it’s nice, but . . .”

  Jonah knew the rest of what she wanted to say: It’s nice, but isn’t it more important to save time than to be nice? It’s nice, but what if that one action ruins time forever?

  “I’m not sure she’s going to make it if we don’t help at least a little,” Jonah whispered back.

  For, as miserable as Jonah and Katherine felt on the long, long train trip, Mileva seemed to be taking it even harder. She’d started looking as though it might kill her.

  Twice she got off the train to throw up.

  The first time it happened, Jonah had insisted that Katherine follow Mileva into the bathroom.

  “What—you want me to go into the stall with her?” Katherine had protested. “Jonah, that’s sick!”

  “What if she flushes the Elucidator down the toilet?” Jonah asked. “What if—”

  “Okay, okay,” Katherine agreed.

  When she came back out of the bathroom, she looked almost as sick as Mileva, only in a nearly invisible way.

  “Don’t you ever ask me to watch someone puke again,” Katherine said, half gagging herself.

  “Do you think Mileva has scarlet fever too?” Jonah asked. “Is vomiting one of the symptoms?”

  “Isn’t scarlet fever kind of like strep throat with a rash?” Katherine asked. “Isn’t that what Makenna Bryant had back in second grade?”

  How did Katherine remember these things?

  “She vomited a lot, that time,” Katherine continued.

  “Oh, wait—was she the kid who threw up all over her table in the cafeteria?” Jonah asked. “And then on the school secretary’s desk, on
her way to the nurse?” He guessed he remembered stuff too.

  But this news made him relax a little.

  “So, if scarlet fever is just bad strep throat, then Mileva is kind of overreacting about her daughter having it, right?” Jonah asked.

  Katherine grimaced.

  “I’ve been trying to remember—I think scarlet fever is what Mary Ingalls had in the Little House books,” Katherine said. “Remember Mom and Dad reading them to us when we were little?”

  “Only I didn’t like them as much as you did, so Dad started reading Captain Underpants books with me instead,” Jonah said, making a face. “Mary was the one who always sat quietly and did what she was told, right? The one who drove her sister crazy, being such a goody-goody?”

  “Yeah—until she caught scarlet fever and went blind,” Katherine said.

  Blind, Jonah thought.

  Mileva wasn’t overreacting, being so worried about her daughter.

  Mileva came out of the bathroom then, and they followed her onto another train.

  It got dark, and still they kept traveling. Jonah was hoping for a nice hotel room and a long night’s sleep. But when they got onto yet another train in Vienna, Mileva said to the conductor, “We’ll be in Budapest by morning, right?”

  What? Jonah thought. We’re going to be on this train all night long?

  “That’s what the schedule says, yes,” the conductor was replying. He leaned in conspiratorially. “But it could be afternoon. You know, over in those areas they’re not so good about tending the tracks. Civilization is wasted on some people.”

  Mileva gritted her teeth.

  “I’m going to see my family,” she told the conductor in a hostile voice. “In Novi Sad. I’m Serbian.”

  The conductor didn’t even flinch.

  “Well, then,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Jonah could tell Mileva had been insulted, but he wasn’t sure: Was this just like people back home in Ohio making fun of Michigan because of college football—a mostly friendly rivalry? Or was it something worse?

  Jonah decided it was worse because of the way Mileva sank into her seat and buried her face in her hands. She was crying.

  “Oh, Albert, what am I doing?” she moaned. “Why didn’t I stay home with you and . . .” She began shaking her head. “No. Why aren’t we all together—you and me and Lieserl—all together as a family?”

  Good question, Jonah thought. What’s the answer?

  She didn’t give an answer. She just kept shaking her head. After a few moments she pulled out the papers Albert had given her.

  “Work,” she muttered. “I will work, and then at least some good can come of this time. I will check Albert’s math, like he wanted me to . . .”

  But she seemed to be staring at the cluster of numbers and symbols without even seeing them.

  Jonah realized that while he and Katherine had been watching Mileva, the train had pulled away from the station. No one had come to sit near Mileva, and she was in something like a private compartment. Her seat and the five empty ones nearby were separated from the rest of the train car by a sliding door.

  “Looks like at least we’ll have somewhere to sleep,” Katherine whispered, pointing at the empty seats.

  “If no one gets on in the middle of the night,” Jonah whispered back.

  He’d thought their voices were quiet enough to get lost in the rumbling of the train wheels against the rails. But Mileva jerked to alertness suddenly and narrowed her eyes, peering right in their direction. Jonah might have expected her to be hysterically afraid—after all, she’d been sobbing moments before. But she only sat calmly, her head cocked to the side. Listening. Watching.

  “You’re still with me,” she said after a few seconds. “You’ve followed me all the way from Bern. And now we’re alone. You can talk to me. Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing here?”

  Jonah and Katherine stood frozen. Jonah was afraid that if he even took a breath, Mileva would be able to hear him.

  “I know you’re there,” Mileva said. “Albert, my husband, he’s an incredible scientist because he’s so good at thinking. The ideas that come out of his head! He’s a genius, you know? Someday the whole world is going to know it.”

  Mileva waited only a second to see if they would respond. Then she went on.

  “But Albert could walk through a blizzard and not know it was snowing. He was terrible at observations with lab experiments—he never would have gotten through university if the rest of us hadn’t helped him,” she said. She shifted slightly in her seat. “But me—I’m good at observation. All day today I’ve been watching the doors that stay open a moment too long, because you’re walking through them. I’ve seen the food disappear off tables in train-station restaurants.”

  Katherine looked at Jonah and frowned.

  Hey! We had to eat! he thought fiercely in her direction.

  She only scowled.

  Silently.

  Mileva kept listing all the ways they’d failed to be completely invisible, completely unnoticeable.

  “I’ve felt my train seat move like someone was climbing on top of it,” she said. “I saw mud that you must have left behind. I’ve smelled your . . . was it perspiration? Ordinary old human sweat?”

  Jonah began surreptitiously sniffing his underarms until he saw that Katherine was glaring even harder at him and making chopping motions with her hands to say, Stop it! Just—stop!

  He glared back at her, hoping she was getting the message: I couldn’t help it! I’m a teenage boy! It was hot! Excuse me if I didn’t think to bring deodorant with me when we got zapped back in time!

  Jonah looked back at Mileva and saw that while he and Katherine had been holding their glaring match, Mileva had slipped her papers back into her bag and pulled out the compass instead. She was holding it up in the air, turning it over and over, examining it. She clicked it open and shut, again and again.

  “Can spirits get muddy and smell like sweat?” Mileva asked. “Do they carry compasses? Is this really a compass?”

  The way she was holding it just with her fingertips, Jonah realized he could lunge at her and grab it away from her in an instant. He braced himself up on his toes, ready to dive—and in the next second Mileva was clutching the Elucidator with both hands again, holding it tightly against her skirt.

  She’d realized the possibilities too.

  “The people I grew up with were so superstitious,” she said. “They put brooms upside down outside their bedroom doors to sweep away nightmares. They believed beeswax was sacred. They would only want to know what kind of spirits you are—evil or good? Do you mean me harm or benefit?”

  Jonah looked at Katherine. Back in the 1480s, on their first trips through time, they’d talked to people from that era: monks, the king of England . . . But they’d been so ignorant then—they’d just been lucky that their conversations hadn’t caused serious damage to time.

  Katherine was shaking her head at Jonah even as he was shaking his head at her. They were agreeing: Neither one of them would answer Mileva’s questions.

  “The people I met at school—my Albert and everyone else—they don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or superstitions,” Mileva continued, looking toward Jonah and Katherine again. “And yet they put their faith in other unseeable things: atoms and molecules and ether, the everlasting ether that surrounds us all. Is that what you’re made of? Are you something scientific? Something . . . maybe . . . straight out of my husband’s thought experiments with time?”

  Jonah shot Katherine a horrified look. How could Mileva have hit upon a guess so close to the truth?

  “Just give us the compass and we’ll leave you alone,” Jonah blurted. “You’ll never have to worry about us again.”

  But even as he spoke those words, he knew: They were lies. Jonah couldn’t figure out what was going on with Lieserl and her parents, but if she was like all of the other missing children in history he’d dealt
with, her life was in danger. And if Jonah and Katherine tried to save her, that would probably mean taking her away from Mileva forever.

  That was definitely something Mileva would worry about, if she knew.

  Mileva tightened her grip on the compass.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not enough. I need answers. I have to understand what’s going on.”

  Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Once again they were in silent agreement: This had gone far enough. Mileva already knew too much. As soon as her guard was down—maybe when she fell asleep?—Jonah and Katherine would just have to wrestle the Elucidator out of her hands. It wouldn’t matter that she’d notice it missing. It wouldn’t matter that she’d know they’d taken it. They couldn’t make her forget anything. All they could do was keep her from learning more.

  Mileva was still peering in their direction, clutching the compass-Elucidator with all her might.

  “And don’t think that you can just overpower me and take this from me,” she said. “If you do that . . . if you do that, I’ll tell everyone I know about you. Or, if you harm me in order to take it away, to keep me silent—my Albert loves me too much. He’d investigate. He’d figure out everything. He’s that smart.

  “And what would you think of that, when you’re trying so hard to stay secret and hidden and out of sight?” Mileva finished.

  Jonah and Katherine said nothing. They did nothing.

  What other choice did they have?

  SEVENTEEN

  It was a long night.

  Jonah and Katherine huddled in the two seats in the compartment that were farthest from Mileva, on either side of the door.

  You just need to go to sleep, Jonah told himself. It’ll be okay. If anyone comes in, you’ll hear the door and wake up. Or if Mileva gets up and heads this way and trips over my feet—well, so what? She already knows I’m here!

  He still couldn’t sleep.

  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?