Three Fates

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