Catch a Falling Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, and he indicated his chair behind the desk. She took it and promptly lost herself in studying the documents.
    Brianna had wandered from bookshelf to bookshelf, and now she was at the end unit, squatting. Which meant she was looking at the lower shelves. Which meant she had spotted —
    “Sherlock Holmes?” she said, and sounded delighted. The things that enchanted Brianna. “Edgar Rice Burroughs? Oh my god! You have Dashiell Hammett! And of course they’re the first editions of the hard covers.” She promptly sat on the floor and started pulling volumes out, which made him blink because no one ever treated his belongings like that, and he was absolutely sure no one had ever sat on the floor before. Then Anita looked up, cleared her throat, and said, “Brianna,
what
are you doing?”
    Brianna turned red, said, “Oops!” and jumped to her feet, then crouched down to put the books back where they belonged. Matthias didn’t care — books, even first editions, weren’t art objects to him but things to be touched and read and enjoyed — but he didn’t say anything except, “Did you see that dreadful movie?”
    “You can’t be talking about
The Maltese Falcon
or you wouldn’t call it dreadful, so you must be talking about the one based on
A Princess of Mars
,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”
    There went that topic of conversation. Matthias forced a smile. “Well, don’t.”
    She gave a last longing glance at the shelf and he asked, “Are you a Holmes fan?”
    “No, not Holmes. Tarzan. Well, not
Tarzan
so much as … my grandpa had a whole collection of those stories. And not just Tarzan, but all of these, Sam Spade, The Continental Op, Buck Rogers, Zorro. He had hardbound copies of the ones he could find that way, as long as they weren’t too expensive. His paychecks didn’t run to first editions. I read them all one summer, I was about ten or eleven. I don’t know what happened to them after he died.”
    Matthias didn’t really know what to say to that, so he accounted it fortunate when Anita said, “Brianna, I’m ready for a closer examination. If you’ll open that case? And then get out the pad and unroll it on the desk here.”
    Brianna moved away from the bookshelf to do Anita’s bidding. Matthias settled a shoulder against the wall and watched.
    • • •
    The house smelled wonderful. Mr. G’s house was amazing — a Georgian-type manor set on acres of beautifully kept lawn and gardens — but it didn’t smell like anything. Okay, maybe it smelled like lemon oil and air freshener. But it didn’t smell like
home
.
    Brianna’s stomach growled the moment she walked through the front door. She could tell Natalie had made chicken soup with dumplings, one of Brianna’s fall favorites, even though it wasn’t quite soup weather yet.
    “Oh, gimme,” she said, coming into the kitchen, where Natalie was sitting on the stool, her nose in a book, both dogs lying at her feet. She was reading … an accounting textbook. No Tarzan for Natalie. If Brianna had gotten to go to college, she wouldn’t have chosen a course of study as boring as that —
    She stifled the thought, reminding herself that it was good Natalie was being practical because if she had wanted to go into theatre or something, what would Brianna have said?
Not on my dime,
sounding like parents everywhere. Or would she have said,
Right on, sister, follow your dreams?
She was kind of glad she hadn’t had to find out.
    “Bowls are where the bowls always are,” Natalie said, getting up and setting her book aside. The dogs got up with her, and Dakota made a move toward the dinner, but Brianna hip-checked her and sent her into the living room. Jasmine went to her usual place by Natalie’s chair at the table without having to be told.
    Brianna got down two bowls and Natalie went to the utensil drawer for spoons and the ladle and Dakota poked her nose in the doorway as if to make sure Brianna had really meant to banish