Three Fates (6 page)

“Maybe they were hoping for more.” He wandered to the door of the bathroom, glanced in.

He’d already decided the Finns deserved some sort of grand prize for the luxury of their baths. Hers, being that her room was plusher, was more spacious than his, but his didn’t lack for details.

The heated floor tiles, the jet tub, the glory of the six-headed shower and towels thick and big as blankets. On her long tiled counter he saw a half dozen pill bottles, most of which proved to be some sort of vitamin or herbal remedy. There was an electric toothbrush, a travel candle, a tube of antibacterial cream. Packets of something called N-ER-G and more packets of something called D-Stress. He counted eight bottles of mineral water.

“You’re a bit of a case, aren’t you, darling?”

She ran a hand over her face. “Traveling’s stressful, it’s hard on the system. I have allergies.”

“Do you now? Why don’t I help you set this place back to rights, then you can take one of your pills and get some sleep.”

“I couldn’t possibly sleep. I need to call hotel security.”

“All right.” It was no skin off his nose, really, and would put more of a hitch in her stride than his. Obliging, he went to the phone and called the front desk to relay the situation.

He even stayed with her when management and security came. He patted her hand while she spoke to them, cooperatively gave his own version of the evening and his name and address, his passport number.

He had, essentially, nothing to hide.

It was nearly two A.M. before he made it back to his own room. He had a long, neat whiskey. Brooded over another.

When Tia woke the next morning, muzzy-brained, he was gone. All that was left to assure her he’d existed in the first place was a note slipped under her door.

She sighed, sat on the edge of the bed and decided she’d never see him again.

 

 

 

 

M
ALACHI called for a meeting the minute he arrived back in Cobh. Due to the import, schedules were hastily rearranged and concerned parties made themselves available.

He stood at the head of the table as he relayed to his partners the events that took place during his stay in Finland.

When the tale was told, he sat, picked up his cup of tea.

“Well, you dimwit, why didn’t you stay and give her another push?”

Since this came from the youngest partner, who also happened to be his sister, Malachi didn’t take particular offense. The meeting table, in the Sullivan tradition, was the kitchen table. Before he answered, he got to his feet again, took the biscuit tin off the counter and helped himself.

“First, because pushing would’ve done more harm than good. The woman has more brains than a cabbage, Becca. If I’d nudged her about the statues right after she’d had her room tossed, she might very well have thought I’d had something to do with the matter. Which,” he added with a scowl, “I suppose I did, indirectly.”

“We can’t blame ourselves for that. We aren’t hooligans, after all, or thieves.” Gideon was the middle child, nearly dead center at not quite two years younger than Malachi, not quite two older than Rebecca. This accident of birth had, more often than not, put him in the position of playing peacemaker between them.

He was his brother’s match in height and build, but had inherited his mother’s coloring. The lean, hollow-cheeked features of the Sullivans were stamped on his face, but his were set off with jet-black hair and Viking blue eyes.

He was, in his way, the most fastidious of the lot. He preferred having everything lined up in tidy columns, and because of it—though Malachi had more of a talent with figures—did duty as family bookkeeper.

“The trip wasn’t wasted,” he went on. “Neither the time nor the expense of it. You made contact with her, and now we’ve reason to believe we’re not alone in our belief that she might be a likely contact to the Fates.”

“We don’t know if she is or isn’t,” Rebecca disagreed. “Because it’s plain as rain it was Malachi who led them to her. Better if you’d gone hunting for the one who’d broken into her room instead of running back home.”

“And how, Mata Hari, would you suggest I do that?” Malachi queried.

“Look for clues,” she said with a sweep of arms. “Interrogate hotel staff. Do
something.
”

“If only I’d remembered to pack my magnifying glass and deerstalker hat.”

Exasperated, she sighed. She could see the sense of what he’d done, but when it came to a choice between sense and action, Rebecca would always toss sense. “All I see is we’re out the price of the travel, and no better off than we were before you had your little fling with the Yank.”

“We didn’t have a fling,” Malachi said with the edge of temper in his voice.

“Well, whose fault is that?” she shot back. “Seems to me you’d’ve gotten more out of her if you’d softened her up in bed.”

“Rebecca.” The quiet censure came from the balance of power. Eileen Sullivan might have birthed three strong-willed children, but she had been, and always would be, the power.

“Ma, the man’s thirty-one years old,” Rebecca stated sweetly. “Surely you’re aware he’s had sex before.”

Eileen was a pretty, tidy woman who took great pride in her family and her home. And when necessary, ruled both with an iron fist.

“This is not a discussion about your brother’s private behavior, but a discussion of business. We agreed Mal would go and see what he would see. And so he has.”

Rebecca subsided, though it wasn’t easy. She adored her brothers, but there were times she could have bashed their heads together just to shake up their brains a bit.

She had the long, lean Sullivan build as well, and could be mistaken for willowy if attention wasn’t paid to the strong shoulders and tough muscles under the skin she liked to pamper.

Her hair was shades lighter than Malachi’s, more a gilded red than chestnut, and her eyes were a softer, mistier green. They were long-lidded and balanced a wide and stubborn mouth in a face more given to angles than curves.

Behind the eyes was a sharp, clever and often impatient brain.

She’d campaigned hard to be the one to go to Helsinki and make initial contact with Tia Marsh. She was still fuming at being outvoted in Malachi’s favor.

“You’d have done no better with her,” Malachi commented, reading her mind easily. “And sex wouldn’t have been an option, would it? In any case, we are better off. She liked me, and she’s not, I’d say, a woman easily comfortable with people. She’s not like you, Becca.” He moved around the table as he spoke, tugged on his sister’s long curly hair. “She’s not adventurous and bold.”

“Don’t try to soften me up.”

He only grinned and tugged her hair again. “At your slowest pace, you’d have moved too fast for her. You’d’ve intimidated her. She’s a shy one, and a bit of a hypochondriac, I think. You wouldn’t have believed the stuff she had. Bottles of pills, little machines. Air purifiers, white-noise makers. It was a wonder when we went through it all for the cops. She travels with her own pillow—some allergic matter.”

“Sounds a dead bore to me,” Rebecca replied.

“No, not a bore.” Malachi remembered that slow, sober smile. “Just a bit nervy is all. Still, when the police got there she pulled herself together. Went through the report, steady as you please, every step of it, from the time she left the hotel to go to her lecture until she walked back in again.”

And hadn’t, he remembered now, missed a single detail.

“She’s got a brain in there,” he mused. “Like a camera taking pictures and filing them in a proper slot, and a spine under all the worry.”

“You liked her,” Rebecca said.

“I did. And I’m sorry to have caused her the trouble. But, well, she’ll get over it.” He sat again, and dumped sugar in the cup of tea he’d let go nearly cold. “We’ll let that end simmer a bit, at least until she’s back in the States and settled. Then I might take a trip to New York.”

“New York.” Rebecca sprang to her feet. “Why do you get to go everywhere?”

“Because I’m the oldest. And because for better or worse, Tia Marsh is mine. We’ll be more careful with step two since it appears our movements are being watched.”

“One of us ought to go deal with that bitch directly,” Rebecca said. “She stole from us, stole what had been in our family for more than three-quarters of a century, and now she’s trying to use us to find the other two pieces. She needs to be told, in no uncertain terms, that the Sullivans won’t stand for it.”

“What she’ll do is pay.” Malachi leaned back. “And dearly when we have the other two Fates and she only the one.”

“The one she stole from us.”

“It’d be hard explaining to the proper authorities that she stole what had already been stolen.” Gideon held up a hand before Rebecca could snap at him. “Eighty-odd years in the past or not, Felix Greenfield stole the first Fate. I think we could come around that, legally, as there’s no one to know it save us. But on the same point, we’ve no real proof that the statue was in our possession, and that someone with Anita Gaye’s reputation would steal it from under our noses.”

Rebecca gave a little sigh. “It’s mortifying she did, as if we were little woolly lambs led dancing to the slaughter.”

“Separate, that statue’s worth no more than a few hundred thousand pounds.” Because it still grated, Malachi put aside how easily he’d been duped out of the little Fate. “But all three together, that’s priceless to the right collector. Anita Gaye’s the right one, and in the end, it’s her wool that’ll be fleeced.”

Sitting in the cheerful butter-yellow kitchen with his granny’s chintz curtains at the window and the smell of summer grass dancing through them, he thought of just what he’d like to do to the woman who’d stolen the family symbol out of his foolish hands.

“I don’t think we should wait to take step two,” he decided. “Tia won’t be back in New York for a couple weeks yet, and I don’t want to show up on her doorstep too soon. What we need to do now is work on unraveling that thread to the second statue.”

Rebecca shook back her hair. “Some of us haven’t been spending their time kicking up their heels in foreign parts. I’ve done quite a bit of unraveling in the last few days.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“Because you’ve been blathering on about your new Yank sweetheart.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Becca.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name at my table,” Eileen said mildly. “Rebecca, stop deviling your brother and preening.”

“I wasn’t preening. Yet. I’ve been searching on the Internet, doing the genealogy and so on. Day and night, by the way, and at great personal sacrifice. That was preening,” she said with a grin to her mother. “Still, it’s a big leap, as all we have to go on is Felix’s memory of what he read on the paper with the statue. The dip in the ocean washed the ink away, and we’re counting on him being clear about what he read before what had to be the most traumatic experience of his life. More, we’re counting on his veracity,” she decided. “And the man was, after all, a thief.”

“Reformed,” Eileen put in. “By the grace of God and the love of a good woman. Or so the story goes.”

“So it goes,” Rebecca agreed. “With the statue was a piece of paper, with a name and address in London. His claim that he committed it to memory as he thought he might stop by one night and ply his trade seems reasonable enough. More reasonable when I roll up my sleeves at the keyboard and find there was indeed a Simon White-Smythe living in Mansfield Park in 1915.”

“You found him!” Malachi beamed at her. “You’re a wonder, Rebecca.”

“I am, as I found more than that. He had a son, name of James, who had two daughters. Both married, but the one lost her husband in the second great war and died childless. The other moved to the States, as her husband was a well-to-do lawyer in Washington, D.C. They had three children, two sons and a daughter. They lost one son when he was just a lad in Vietnam, the other hightailed it to Canada, and I haven’t been able to get a line on him. But the daughter married three times. Can you beat it? She’s living in Los Angeles. She had one child with husband number one, daughter. I tracked her down, too, on the information highway. She’s living at the moment in Prague, with employment at some club there.”

“Well, Prague’s closer than Los Angeles,” Malachi replied. “Couldn’t have just stayed in London, could they? We’re taking a leap of faith here, that the man White-Smythe had the statue to begin with, or knew how to get it. That if he had it, it’s been kept in the family, or there’s a record where it went. And that all being the case, we can finagle it out of their hands.”

“It was a leap of faith when your great-great-grandfather gave his life jacket to a stranger and her child,” Eileen put in. “To my mind there’s a reason he was spared when so many were lost. A reason why that little statue was in his pocket when he was saved. Because of that, it belongs to this family,” she continued with her cool, unshakable logic. “And as it’s part of a piece, the others should come to us as well. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. We can afford a ticket to Prague to see if there’s an answer there.”

She smiled serenely at her daughter. “What’s the name of the club, darling?”

 

 

THE NAME OF the club was Down Under, and it escaped the sloppy slide down to dive due to the vigilance of its proprietor, Marcella Lubriski. Whenever the joint would start to waver, Marcella would kick it back up to level by the toe of her stiletto heel.

She was a product of her country and her time, part Czech, part Slavic, with a drop of Russian and a whiff of German in the blood. When the Communists had taken over, she’d gathered up her two young children, told her husband to go or stay, and fled to Australia, as it seemed just far enough away.