Catch a Falling Star (3 page)

Brianna gave a crisp nod. “Fine. Who mowed the lawn?”

“I did,” Natalie said, not entirely truthfully but Brianna didn’t need to know that.

“
You
did?” Brianna rocked back on her heels, clearly not expecting that answer. “You don’t even know how to start the mower.”

“Yeah, well, Joe showed me how.”

“Joe.” Brianna sat down on the step, the exact step where Joe had sat, only she looked a lot more belligerent than Joe had. When Brianna looked belligerent, her red curls stood out in agitated poufs and her green eyes flashed. She was tall and statuesque, so it was quite impressive. When Natalie was younger she’d thought that was what an avenging angel would look like, Brianna on a tear.

“Joe’s a guy from school.”

Brianna nodded, still belligerent but trying to pretend she wasn’t. “And you asked him to mow the lawn?”

“No,” Natalie said, as patiently as she could. “He works for a lawn service, and he was mowing Mrs. Bauer’s lawn and I said, ‘Can you teach me how to do that?’ and he did.”

She picked up her accounting book again, knowing that wasn’t going to stop Brianna.

“Why?” Brianna ran an agitated hand through her curls, making them go askew in all directions. Now that Natalie was no longer a kid, she thought Brianna looked less like an avenging angel and more like an impatient Raggedy Ann doll, but Natalie would never tell her that.

“I wanted to learn.”

“I could have shown you.”

“
Could
have,” Natalie muttered, “but
haven’t
.”

Brianna sighed. “I know it looked awful but I was planning to do it tomorrow after work. I hate the idea of you overexerting yourself.”

“Mowing the lawn isn’t going to hurt me, or induce a relapse, or whatever you seem to think will happen,” Natalie said, and now she wasn’t trying to be patient anymore.

“I worry,” Brianna said, and she said it apologetically, but Natalie was beyond fed up with it. She clapped her book closed and got to her feet, dislodging Jasmine, who gave a protesting bark, and said, “You know what, Brianna? That’s
your
problem, not mine, and I’m not going to sit on my ass for the rest of my life just because
you worry
.”

The door slammed shut behind her. It only felt good for about two seconds.

• • •

Well, that went well.
Brianna played with Jasmine’s ears and gave the dog’s head a good rub. She knew that she was sometimes overprotective of Natalie, and okay, Natalie was an adult now, but old habits died hard. And Natalie didn’t understand what it was like to watch, helpless, as her sister fought for one more day. She got that Natalie had had it much worse than Brianna ever had, but it was Brianna who had held it all together, wasn’t it? It was Brianna who had always made sure they had a roof over their heads, and food to eat, and decent medical care. It was Brianna who’d given up college so Natalie could go, and Brianna —

Who had never once spent a day in the hospital as a patient. Who had never once had poison injected into her veins. Who had never once wondered if she would wake up tomorrow.
Brianna
had had a childhood. She had played tag with the other kids in the neighborhood and skinned her knees falling on the basketball court at the park. She hadn’t been exactly carefree, but she had set up elaborate imaginary quests for her dolls to go on and blown bubbles at the sky and flown kites in the springtime and thought the big wide world was hers for the taking.

She leaned back on her elbows and sighed. “I’m sorry, Nat,” she said, though she knew Nat couldn’t hear her. The slammed door stood between them. “I’m so damned sorry for both of us.”

• • •

Richard Daniels looked at the map of Crestview that was open on the seat next to him. The town ought to be more familiar to him; he had lived here for ages, but that had been a long time ago and the interceding years had made his memory hazy. And the town had grown. You couldn’t properly call it a town anymore. It was a city.

There were fewer familiar landmarks now. Open fields had turned into housing developments, buildings had been torn down and new ones erected in their place, looking entirely different. None of the houses looked right, or the trees. What had once been saplings had grown tall and shady. Funny how that happened, how time got away from you.

He folded up the map and stuck it in the pocket of the driver’s side door and started the car, a rental he had picked up from the airport. It was getting late, and he wasn’t even sure she — they — lived there anymore, at the house he and Chrissy had bought in a spasm of delusion about the way things could be.

He’d go by … on Saturday. He felt like a coward when the relief washed over him. A man ought not be so afraid of facing his own family.

“Look at this,” Anita Trainor was saying, gesturing at her arm, which was in a cast. The cast was in a sling. She looked more mad than anything.

“What happened?” Brianna asked the curator, putting her pen down. The seemingly never-ending pile of invitations had gone out and she had a bunch of other tasks to catch up on but didn’t mind an interruption. It wasn’t like her job was a thrill a minute.

“Stupid accident. I fell. I got home late from dinner last night, and the front porch light had burned out, and I missed my step and fell. And broke my wrist.”

Brianna winced. “That sucks.” She remembered her father stumbling home late at night, too inebriated to even get his key in the lock. More than once he’d broken a bone or chipped a tooth as a result of a drunken fall. Though it was probably unfair of Brianna to speculate on the underlying reasons for Anita’s fall. Sometimes people just missed a step in the dark.

“Yeah, well, what really sucks is trying to do my job one-handed.” Brianna tried not to be shocked to hear Anita use the word “sucks.” “I’m supposed to go over to to see Mr. G today — ”

She must have said something else, but once Brianna heard “Mr. G” she seemed incapable of following the rest of the comment. G for Gorgeous, G for Generous. He hadn’t called her yet today —

“So?” Anita said impatiently, which meant she was waiting for an answer, which meant the rest of the comment must have been a question. If only thoughts of Mr. G didn’t make Brianna’s mind so fuzzy.

“I’m sorry,” Brianna said. There was nothing to do but own up to her distraction. Not that she intended to reveal the nature of that distraction. “My mind was on something else. What did you ask?”

“Hmpf,” Anita said. “I asked you if you’d be able to come over to Mr. G’s house with me and help me pack and transport that plate.”

Brianna tried not to grin at her unexpected good luck. What she ended up with was probably something like an annoying smirk. “Sure,” she said. “I can finish this stuff later.”

“Fine. You can drive,” Anita said grumpily, but Brianna didn’t even mind. Mr. G had said there would be “someone” at the house, which probably meant a housekeeper, but it was possible
he
might be there. She knew he was a partner in the prestigious law firm of Burke, Gustafson, and Whitehead, but one of the perks of being a partner was that you didn’t have to report to the office from nine to five. Unlike being a lowly administrative assistant. If nothing else, she could see where he lived — the estate was supposed to be truly spectacular. Brianna had never been there before. For some reason, Mr. G failed to invite her to his parties.

Brianna scooped up her purse and slung it over her shoulder as she followed Anita back to her lab/office, where she indicated a black metal case that looked, and was, extremely heavy. Anita picked up a box of packing materials with her good arm. Brianna hefted the heavy case and led the way down to the parking lot, puffing a little by the time she got to the battered Ford.

She heaved the case into the trunk (“Careful!” Anita exclaimed), put the box of packing materials next to it, and then had to pause to dump all the library books from the passenger seat into the backseat so that Anita could get in. Brianna leaned against the driver’s side door for a minute, trying to get her breath back. That equipment was damned heavy.

When she climbed in, she saw Anita was wrestling one-handed with the seatbelt but when Brianna opened her mouth to offer to help, she was rewarded with a death glare, so she closed her mouth. While she waited for Anita to subdue the seatbelt she said, “What’s in that case?”

Anita grunted like she would expect any employee of the Cooper-Renfield Museum to know the answer to that, but Brianna worked in the front office, not down in the dungeons with the actual art objects. Brianna waited patiently. Anita never passed up a chance to lecture, even about something she thought Brianna should know.

“I have to ascertain to the limited extent I can — under the circumstances — that what Mr. G is offering is in fact a genuine Yuan dynasty plate,” she said in her usual rapid-fire delivery. “So the case contains various pieces of equipment, like a microscope, for me to use to examine the plate. There is no point in bringing it back to the museum if I can tell right away that it’s a fake.”

There you go. Brianna, who didn’t trust anyone, would have trusted Mr. G just because he was Mr. G.
This is what lust does to your brain, Brianna.

Anita got her seatbelt buckled into place finally and concluded, “We certainly don’t want to discover it’s a fake once it’s in our keeping, because then we potentially create another issue.”

Brianna could guess what that other issue might be, or in fact, she could guess what several issues might be, proving she hadn’t worked at the museum for eight years for nothing. She nodded and put the car in gear.

• • •

Matthias was looking up the historical precedents in a particularly abstruse area of patent law, the lucrative and usually engaging focus of his law practice, but he couldn’t seem to keep his mind on it this morning. It wasn’t that he kept getting interrupted — he was working from his home office today and had all the peace and quiet he needed. And it wasn’t that he was uncomfortable, or hungry, or anything of that nature. His office was quite well-appointed — luxurious, even — and the house held anything a man needed in the way of food or drink.

He was, face it, bored. After nearly ten years of dealing with patent law, he no longer found it appealing. Had he ever? Of course he had. He remembered tirelessly arguing cases in law school with his friend Donald Burke. In their first years at the firm — which had belonged to their fathers — he and Donald had continued their energetic debates. But in the last few years, the work had become less engaging and more rote.

For a moment Matthias let his thoughts wander to other areas of law that he had studied during law school. What if had chosen a different area? Criminal law, for example. He supposed that might be interesting, but probably only in the way that watching a train wreck was interesting. He could just imagine what his father would have thought. And he could easily guess what Donald would say if Matthias suggested he wanted to start representing criminals. (“There’s no money in that,” was what Donald would say, as if either of them needed more money.)

He sighed and tossed his reading glasses on the desk before wandering restlessly over to the bookcases that lined one wall. Open-shelved bookcases, not the kind covered with glass beloved by attorneys the world ’round. Matthias didn’t want to fuss with glass doors when he was pulling books out by the armful to find the citation he needed. And he had Beverly and her team of housekeepers to keep the dust down.

In fact his office was so clean and well taken care of that it practically gleamed. It didn’t look like anyone actually worked here, although he knew for a fact that he had been quite busy all morning. Which meant he was a man who had made no impact on his surroundings.

That was a depressing thought. Maybe he ought to toss some printer paper on the floor just to prove he existed.

A knock at the open door made him swing around. Beverly, wearing her usual neat suit and low heels, said, “The curator is here, from the museum. Anita Trainor. And … her helper.”

He wondered what the helper had said or done to make Beverly refer to her like that, but he didn’t ask. He glanced at his watch. Brianna had told him ten
A.M.
and it was ten
A.M.
on the dot.

“Would you like me to oversee the arrangements?” Beverly asked.

“No, I’ll do it,” he said, grateful for a task that wasn’t related to patent law. Maybe what he needed was a short break, and then everything would go back to normal.

“Very good. Shall I show them in?”

This was the room where the plate was kept, so they might as well see it
in situ
, so to speak. And if he carried it out to them he’d probably break it at the last minute. Not that that really mattered to him. But it would shatter Anita’s heart.

“Yes, please,” he said, closing the folder on his desk and putting the paperweight on it.

A few moments later, Beverly showed the two women in, Anita carrying a box of packing materials and … it appeared to be Brianna hauling in a heavy case of some sort. He would probably recognize those crazy red curls fifty years and ten thousand miles from now. He smiled.

“Oohff,” Brianna said, and set the case down on his desk, a little harder than was probably good for the desk. “I think I herniated a disk.” She pushed a palm against her back and arched, the thin fall sweater she was wearing pulling taut … but she probably wouldn’t appreciate him ogling — never once in their acquaintance had she given a signal that she even noticed he was male — so he turned to Anita and exclaimed at the sight of her cast and sling, “Oh my goodness! What happened?”

She responded with a rushed explanation of her fall, and he expressed concern and thanked her for coming by despite the fact that she must be in a lot of pain. She gave a little laugh and said, “Oh, no, thank
you
, Mr. Gustafson! What a generous donation. And of course I am thrilled to be the one to take care of it.”

She turned to look at the plate on its pedestal in the corner. “This is it?” she asked, reverence in her voice.