Caught (Missing) Read online

  “It’s worth a shot,” Katherine said, shrugging.

  Jonah drew the Elucidator from his pocket. When he’d begged for invisibility in the last moments of their trip through time, he’d neglected to ask the Elucidator to make itself invisible, too. So once it was out of his pocket, the Elucidator was fully visible. For a few seconds he amused himself by covering it with his hands—making it disappear completely—and then holding it flat in his crystalline palm. All he had to do was squint, and it looked as if the Elucidator were appearing from nowhere and floating in midair.

  “You are such a boy,” Katherine snorted. “Playing games when we’ve got serious problems to deal with!”

  Why was it okay to insult males, but totally wrong and sexist to say anything bad about females?

  Jonah knew better than to ask this question out loud.

  “This isn’t a game,” he said in an offended tone. “It’s a science experiment. I bet Albert Einstein would be doing the same thing if he was me.”

  “Only if his IQ fell into negative numbers,” Katherine said. “Oh, wait—that is you!”

  She snatched the Elucidator out of his hand the next time he opened his palm.

  “Interesting,” she said, rubbing her fingers over its carved surface. “What’s it imitating now?”

  When they’d left the twenty-first century, the Elucidator had been black and sleek, resembling the most updated cell phone Jonah had ever seen. But somehow on the trip through time it had transformed itself into an old-fashioned wooden-and-leather case.

  That’s probably what cell phones would have looked like if they’d had cell phones in the Victorian era, Jonah thought. But—they didn’t. They barely even had phones.

  Katherine flipped a clasp at the front of the Elucidator, and the lid sprang open, revealing a layer of glass and a needle and face below.

  “Oh—it’s a compass,” Jonah said.

  “I guess that’s a step up from a rock or a candleholder,” Katherine said, making a face. “But how do we talk on it?” She tapped the glass. “Hello? JB? Hello? Are you there? Are you somewhere with Einstein’s daughter?”

  There was a noise behind them—a gasp. And then the sound of running: thump-slide-thump-slide-thump-slide . . .

  Jonah whirled around to see Mileva dashing toward them.

  She can’t see us. We’re invisible, he reminded himself. But—the Elucidator—

  He put his hand out to cover over the Elucidator, to hide it. But he was too late.

  Mileva had already snatched the Elucidator from Katherine’s grasp.

  NINE

  Jonah immediately tried to grab the Elucidator back from Mileva. But he had to be careful not to touch her hand, only the wooden case. He darted around, waiting for the exact right moment, the exact right angle.

  Greedily, Mileva encircled the entire compass case with both hands, effectively killing all of Jonah’s best chances.

  Beside him, Katherine shot him an anguished look, mouthing the words, What do we do? What do we do?

  Jonah held up his hand warningly.

  Wait, he mouthed back. But how long had Mileva been behind them? How much had she seen? How much had she heard? What did she know?

  Mileva huddled on the floor and bent down over the Elucidator/compass case.

  “What do you know about Lieserl?” she shouted at it. “You haven’t harmed her, have you? Please, God, no . . . Why would you? We’re nobodies. Unless . . .”

  The Elucidator lay silent in her hands. She stared at it, and tears began streaming down her face.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  Jonah held his breath. Beside him Katherine stood equally frozen. The Elucidator stayed silent. After a moment Mileva rocked back on her heels, her expression a mix of craftiness and confusion.

  “Albert would think me mad, trying to talk to a compass,” she murmured. She blinked, and then wiped her face with the back of her hand. She kept her tight grip on the Elucidator but began looking carefully about the room, studying the open window, the pictures on the wall, the papers scattered on the table, the chairs that Katherine and Jonah had knocked askew when they were scrambling around Mileva. She looked right through Katherine and Jonah, then turned her head and looked straight through them again.

  “Madness or not, I know someone’s here,” she said. “I heard you. I feel your presence. Are you angels? Demons? Ghosts?” Something changed in her face, a curtain of fear falling across it. “No, no—I know you’re not Lieserl’s ghost, come to haunt her poor, sad mama. Lieserl’s alive. They would tell me if anything happened to Lieserl.” She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “But I am not some ignorant village girl, her mind awash in superstition. I am a scientist, regardless of my last exam grades. I will solve this with rationality. I will look at the empirical data.”

  She stood up. She still clung tightly to the Elucidator, but Jonah noticed that her hands were trembling. He took a step back, trying to stay out of her way, and a floorboard creaked beneath his feet.

  Mileva instantly jerked her head down to glare at the offending floorboard. She pressed her foot down in the same spot, making the floorboard creak again in the same way. And again. And again.

  She pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Jonah saw the chair separate completely from its tracer version. Mileva was here, now, only because of them.

  “Fact,” Mileva whispered, still gazing about. “This afternoon I could have sworn I felt a living, breathing child fall into my arms when there was no such child in sight.”

  She paused.

  “Fact,” she continued. She was grim-faced now, her jaw clenched. “I lied to my husband and told him I had a headache so I could come back to the apartment and check out my suspicions. When I arrived at the apartment, I heard voices. I heard a floorboard creak when no one trod upon it. I saw this compass floating through the air.” She lifted the Elucidator in the air, studying it carefully, from all angles. “And I have never seen this compass before in my life. It does not belong in our apartment.”

  Should Jonah snatch the Elucidator away now? Across the table, he saw Katherine silently shaking her head at him.

  She’s right, Jonah thought. If the Elucidator disappeared from Mileva’s hands, that would just give her another suspicious fact for her list.

  He lifted his hands in the air, a gesture of helplessness.

  Mileva was frowning now. She pressed her hands tightly around the Elucidator again.

  “All the male scientists would add an additional ‘fact,’” she said bitterly. “That I am a female, and therefore prone to hysterics and hallucinations. And I am a female who has been under great strain lately, through great emotional turmoil. Even my own husband would not believe me if I told him what I just witnessed! I cannot tell even him!”

  Behind her, Jonah heard a key rattling in the door.

  “Mileva! Mein Liebchen! The musical evening was no fun without you, so I came back too,” Albert called, his entrance as loud and clumsy as Mileva’s had been silent and stealthy. “Who are you talking to?”

  Mileva instantly closed her hand around the Elucidator, lowering it toward the table.

  “No one,” she called back in a quavery voice. “Only myself.”

  And before Albert had stepped across the threshold into the room, Mileva had the Elucidator tucked into her skirt pocket, completely out of sight.

  And completely out of Jonah and Katherine’s reach.

  TEN

  “We’ll get the Elucidator back in the morning,” Jonah whispered to Katherine.

  Albert and Mileva had gone off to bed, Albert seeming not to notice that Mileva had kept her hand firmly over her skirt pocket the entire rest of the evening.

  “She’s got to let go of it sometime,” Jonah muttered.

  “Yeah, and how are we going to make her forget that she ever saw it?” Katherine countered. “How are we going to make her forget whatever she heard us say? How are we going to get Einstein to stop
thinking about time splitting in 1611? How are we ever going to get home again?”

  “How about if we just focus on figuring out where to sleep tonight?” Jonah asked weakly. He looked around the small room. “It should be somewhere out of the way, where no one’s going to step on us. . . . Is there space for both of us to fit under that couch?”

  “I’m not sleeping under any couch,” Katherine said crankily. “I’m not sleeping at all. I’m going to look for clues.”

  Jonah had been on enough of these time-travel adventures with Katherine to know: She was always grumpiest when she was the most terrified. Still, he felt like he had to point out the obvious.

  “It’s too dark to see any ‘clues,’” he muttered. “If you turn a light on, you might wake up Albert or Mileva.”

  “They’ve been using, like, kerosene lamps,” Katherine said. “If we turn one on really low, they’ll never know.”

  Jonah cast a worried glance at the bedroom door, but didn’t say anything else.

  Katherine lit a lamp and carried it toward a desk in the corner. She set the lamp on the floor and sat down behind it, trying to hide the light.

  “You go through the top drawer,” she whispered. “I’ll take the middle drawer.”

  Jonah sat down beside her, a little closer to the desk.

  At first, all the papers they found were like the ones they’d seen on the table: covered with incomprehensible scientific scrawling. The only difference was that these papers left behind identical tracers when Jonah and Katherine picked them up.

  “So, when Albert wrote these papers, whatever they are, he was thinking about the right things,” Jonah muttered. “He wasn’t ruining anything.”

  “Yeah, that’d be a great clue—if we knew what any of it meant,” Katherine said glumly.

  “And if we knew how old these papers are,” Jonah said. “Didn’t Albert ever have teachers who told him to put dates on all his work? Mr. Stanley would have given him an F, just for that.”

  He snorted, imagining this: Albert Einstein showing up as a kid in Mr. Stanley’s class somehow, Mr. Stanley flunking him, Einstein instantly growing a moustache and a headful of white hair in some sort of time-lapse sequence and sneering at Mr. Stanley, “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Jonah, I don’t think all this is for any class,” Katherine said, still sorting through papers. “I think this is what Albert Einstein does for fun. Oh—here’s a date on something!”

  She held up a stiff, formal-looking certificate with the names Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric written on it in a flowery script.

  “I think this is their marriage license,” Katherine said. “Looks like they got married on January 6, 1903. So we know that much!”

  “Yeah, and what good does that do us, when we don’t know what year it is now?” Jonah countered.

  “Do you have to be so negative about everything?” Katherine complained, waving the certificate scoldingly at him.

  Jonah shoved her away. Unfortunately, he pushed a little too hard, and her elbow knocked against the kerosene lamp. It wobbled back and forth, and Jonah could just see what was about to happen: Kerosene splashing out, flame leaping from the lamp to the papers . . . oh, yeah, if Katherine and I set Albert Einstein’s apartment on fire—that will really help history!

  He reached out and grabbed the top rim of the lamp, steadying it. But the glass was unbearably hot. He jerked back, his head slamming against the top edge of the desk. There was a soft click, and the ornate carving that ran along the edge sagged down.

  “You broke it!” Katherine accused.

  Jonah stared at the damage he’d done. Then he blinked, and it didn’t look like damage after all.

  “No,” he whispered. “I found a secret compartment!”

  ELEVEN

  Katherine held the lamp up—very carefully—and then Jonah could see to reach into the secret compartment. It was a small space, with barely enough room to slide his fingers in and sweep to the right and left. Would he find some original formula that Einstein hadn’t yet revealed to the world? Would he get to see the famous “E = mc2” in Einstein’s original writing?

  Jonah’s fingertips brushed a single paper. No, not a paper—a picture.

  He dislodged it, knocking it out of the secret compartment into his other hand. He held it up to Katherine’s lamp, and they both stared at it.

  The picture showed a little girl, barely more than a baby. She wore a frilly dress and had a huge white bow in her hair, and she was standing in a field of flowers. It was hard to tell what the flowers were because it was all in black and white—or, what was that tint that old photos sometimes had? Sepia? It was hard to make out colors in the flickering lamplight; it was hard to make out much of anything in the fuzzy photograph. But something about the girl’s steady gaze made Jonah think that she would be an interesting person when she grew up.

  “Look at what’s written at the bottom—‘Lieserl,’” Katherine whispered. “That’s the same name Mileva said before. Think this is their daughter?”

  “Who keeps their kid’s picture hidden in a secret compartment?” Jonah asked.

  He thought about all the pictures his parents had of him and Katherine on display back home: every single one of their school pictures since kindergarten lining the stairway; all his soccer team pictures on the bookcase in the family room; pictures of Katherine’s piano recitals in the living room; a formal, posed picture of the whole family and various family vacation photos in the upstairs hallway.

  Was the early twentieth century that incredibly different from the early twenty-first century? Was that the only reason Lieserl Einstein’s picture was hidden away in a secret compartment instead of hanging on the Einsteins’ wall?

  Jonah didn’t think so.

  “I wonder—,” Katherine began.

  Just then they heard the bedroom door rattle. In a flash Katherine turned the knob to put out their lamp.

  “Put everything back where it was!” Jonah hissed in her ear.

  Fumbling in the darkness, he shoved the picture of Lieserl back into the secret compartment and eased the carved wood back into place. Then he began throwing papers back into the drawer.

  The bedroom door opened, revealing Albert Einstein holding a lamp of his own.

  “What if the square root is the answer?” he mumbled.

  He stepped forward and pulled the bedroom door shut behind him. Then he walked to the table and sat down. He turned the knob on his lamp to make it brighter, the flame illuminating a wider and wider circle. Jonah and Katherine were only a few feet away from him—Jonah could see the light glowing right through Katherine, clearly revealing all the papers she hadn’t been able to put away yet.

  But Albert kept his head bent over the papers on the table, completely unaware.

  “I think, if we just finish cleaning up without making any noise, we’ll be okay,” Jonah whispered as softly as he could.

  Katherine nodded and went back to sliding papers into the drawer. This time she was careful to match them up with their tracers. She slid the drawer silently back into the desk, and Jonah did the same with his.

  As far as Jonah could tell, Albert didn’t look up even once. He didn’t move at all, except to send his pen flying across the paper.

  “I guess we might as well sleep, if he’s going to work all night,” Katherine whispered.

  Jonah nodded.

  The couch turned out to be too low to sleep under, so the best they could do was to press themselves as close to the wall as possible. Jonah thought he’d be out the minute he closed his eyes, but lowering his eyelids meant that he could see all the horrific images of the day, all over again: Jonah’s entire science class sitting frozen in time, Angela’s car barreling toward Katherine, Chip’s clammy face appearing and vanishing, Mileva’s hands closing over the Elucidator.

  What does any of it mean? Jonah wondered. What are we supposed to do?

  He wasn’t aware of actually falling asleep—it was more
that he kept seeing the images play and replay in his head, and after a while they seemed to be parts of nightmares more than actual memories.

  It was a relief when he woke up to bright sunshine streaming in through the window.

  Well, there, he thought. We survived the night. And today’s got to be better. We’ll find some way to get the Elucidator back from Mileva. We’ll figure out some way to solve everything and go home.

  That was when he heard the screaming.

  TWELVE

  It was a female voice, so Jonah looked around immediately for Katherine.

  She was right beside him, and also jerking her head frantically back and forth, trying to see what was wrong. The sunlight streamed right through her—her body left no shadow on the floor—so Jonah could cross off “We must have lost our invisibility, and someone saw us!” as a reason for the screaming.

  He looked toward the table where Albert Einstein had been working the night before, but it was deserted now. Jonah looked toward the desk he and Katherine had searched—had they left something out? Had they completely messed up?

  No—the desk looked just as it had the night before, the drawers lined up perfectly.

  Jonah listened harder, and could make out actual words in the screaming: “Albert! Oh, Albert!”

  Was the screaming coming from outside the apartment? Maybe even from the street down below?

  Jonah heard a sound of feet pounding their way unevenly up the stairs. The door leading out of the apartment slammed open, just as a sleepy-looking Albert stumbled out of the bedroom. With his hair mashed to the side and a look of confusion on his face, he looked even less like the venerable old-man Einstein than before.

  “Did I oversleep?” he asked. “Am I late for work?”

  Mileva tripped coming into the apartment.

  “No, no, it’s Lieserl,” she sobbed.

  Albert moved quickly across the floor, shutting the apartment door behind his wife.