Caught (Missing) Read Online Free PDF Page A

yeah, Jonah thought. Her brain’s telling her that some kid just slammed against her. But her eyes are telling her there’s no one there.
    Surprisingly, the young woman didn’t cry out, didn’t shriek—didn’t even gasp. Instead, after a long moment, she closed her eyes and took a slow step forward, gently waving her arms in front of her.
    Not the best way to try to catch someone, Jonah thought.
    But he was almost hypnotized by the grace of her movements. Her expression was different now too—was she praying? Was that what all the hope and wonder and yearning on her face meant?
    It took Katherine yanking on his arm to remind Jonah that he couldn’t just stand there watching.
    “This way!” she hissed in his ear.
    She pulled him to the side, past a stiff dark couch to a corner beside an open window. He guessed she thought they could jump out if they had to.
    But the woman had stopped moving forward. She let her arms drop. She turned her head to gaze at the young man sitting at the table. He hadn’t changed his pose in the slightest since the woman had come in. He still had his head bent over a stack of papers.
    “My Johnnie,” the woman said softly.
    “See! That isn’t Albert Einstein!” Jonah whispered to Katherine. “It’s Johnnie somebody!”
    But the man didn’t look up.
    “Albert,” the woman said, louder. “Albert, listen!”
    The man jerked to attention, reacting with such shock that he knocked a whole stack of papers to the floor.
    “Mitsa! My Dollie!” he cried. “My urchin! My little witch! I didn’t hear you come in! I—” He bent over to pick up the papers from the floor, and stopped talking. Distractedly, he gazed at the papers in his hand. He squinted. “No, wait. Did I square that? Should I?” he mumbled.
    The woman—Mitsa? Dollie?—shook her head fondly.
    “Albert, I swear, you haven’t heard anything anyone’s said to you since you started this new project,” she said. “Someone could set off a cannon right beside you and you wouldn’t notice.”
    “Or, if it’s cubed, that would mean . . . ,” Albert mumbled, completely engrossed in his papers again.
    The woman sighed and walked to the table. Her bodydipped down every other step, dragging the bottom of her long skirt on the floor.
    She has a limp, Jonah thought. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed that before. Even with the limp, he still thought she moved gracefully.
    When the woman reached the table, she eased the papers out of Albert’s hand.
    “Mileva!” Albert protested.
    He sounded so serious, Jonah guessed that had to be the woman’s real name.
    “Maybe you should try using the square root,” Mileva said, looking down at a long string of calculations.
    “Really?” Albert said eagerly. “You think that’s the answer?”
    “No,” Mileva said, holding the papers out of his reach behind her back. “I really don’t know. But I know you’ll try it if you haven’t already. And—I’ll help you. Later on. After—”
    Albert interrupted her by springing up and trying to reach around her back for the papers. She slid the papers onto the table and caught him in her arms, hugging him close.
    “This is just what I wanted for our marriage,” Mileva whispered into his shoulder. “You, me, our calculations and formulas, our grand ideas . . . But I didn’t know thedevil’s bargain I’d have to make to get this. Are you sure there isn’t some other way?”
    Albert didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking past her to the papers on the table, and still mumbling: “Square root . . . proportional distance . . . time . . . time . . . space . . . time split in half . . . But what changed in 1611?”
    Jonah felt Katherine bolt completely upright behind him, smashed into the corner. He turned and looked at his sister, and her wide, alarmed eyes told him she was thinking the same thing as he was.
    Jonah didn’t know if Albert Einstein was famous yet or not, in whatever early