Three Fates

had her traveling to Dublin, spending those few weeks overseeing the opening of a Morningside branch there? Just as it had been fate that had urged her to take an appointment with one Malachi Sullivan.
    She’d known of the Three Fates. Paul had told her the story. He’d had an endless supply of long-winded, tedious stories. But this one had caught her interest. Three silver statues, forged, some said, on Olympus itself. That, of course, was nonsense, but legend added a luster, and a value, to objects. Three sisters, separated by time and circumstances, falling into various hands over the years. And separated, they were no more than pretty bits of art.
    But if and when they were brought together . . . She ran her fingertip over the shallow notch in the base, where Clotho had once linked to Lachesis. Together, they were beyond price. And some, a gullible some in Anita’s mind, said that together they were beyond power. Wealth beyond imagining, control of one’s own destiny unto immortality.
    Paul hadn’t believed they existed. A pretty story, he’d claimed. A kind of Holy Grail for collectors of antiquities. She’d passed it off as well. Until Malachi Sullivan had asked for her professional opinion.
    It had been child’s play to seduce him into seducing her. Then to blind his caution with lust until he trusted her enough to put the statue into her hands. For tests and assessments, she’d told him. For research.
    He’d told her enough, more than enough to assure her that she could take the statue from him with impunity. What could he do—some middle-class Irish sailor, descended by his own accounting from a thief—against a woman of her unimpeachable reputation?
    Stealing outright, she thought now, had been a glorious rush.
    He’d made noise, of course, but her money and position, and the miles of ocean between them, insulated her against any trouble he could stir. As she’d expected, he’d quieted down again in a matter of weeks.
    What she hadn’t expected was for him to outmaneuver her—even temporarily—for the other two pieces of the prize. She’d wasted time delicately questioning Wyley Antiques’s current owners while he had zeroed in on Tia Marsh.
    He got nothing from her, Anita knew now. There hadn’t been time. There’d been nothing in her hotel room, nothing on her laptop that pertained to the statues, or to her ancestor.
    And nothing in the more discreet search of her New York apartment. Still, she believed Tia was a key, one worth turning in any case.
    She’d pursue that personally, she decided. Just as she would pursue the New York thread of Simon White-Smythe personally. She’d leave her incompetent employees to track down the black sheep of that family, while she courted the cream of it.
    Once she had the second Fate, she’d use all her resources, all her energies, by any means, to find and acquire the third.

    TI A SPENT THE first twenty-four hours after the flight home sleeping or shuffling around her apartment in her pajamas. Twice she woke up in the dark without a clue where she was. And, remembering, had hugged herself in sheer joy before snuggling back into her pillow and sleep.
    The second day, she indulged in a long bath—lukewarm water and plenty of lavender oil—then changed into fresh pajamas and went back to sleep.
    When she was awake and wandering the apartment, she’d stop to touch something—the back of a chair, the side of a table, the round dome of a paperweight. She would think, Mine. My things, my apartment, my country.
    She could open the drapes and look out on her view of the East River, enjoy the look of the water that always managed to soothe and thrill her. Or close them again and imagine herself in a lovely, cool cave.
    There was no one waiting for her, no need to dress, to style her hair, to gear up mentally and emotionally for an appearance.
    She could, if she wanted, stay in her pajamas for a week and talk to no one. She could lie in her own, wonderful bed and do nothing but read or watch television.
    Of course, that was bad for the back. And, of course, she needed to fix proper meals and reacquaint her system with basic routine. She was running low on echinacea, too, and really needed to go out and buy some fresh bananas if she didn’t want her potassium level to dip.
    But she could make it one more day. Just one more. Because the prospect of having no conversations whatsoever, even with a clerk at the market, was so wonderful it was worth the