Final Hour (Novella) (5 page)

Undine watches Ursula take one of the guns from the picnic cooler.

She appears to be unfazed, as though resigned to whatever punishment her sister wishes to mete out to her, even if it is a painful death.

Her indifference is a lie.

Undine cherishes the world for the beauty she sees everywhere in it. She always has. Still does. She wants desperately to live.

Undine cares less for her own beauty—and what it can do for her if well used—than she cares for the beauty of any flower or for that of a butterfly.

She is a fool. An impractical, childishly romantic, weak, and timid fool. But smart.

She entered college when just fifteen. Graduated at eighteen. Went off to that cottage on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, to write her treacle, her poetry, and to paint.

For six years, Daddy supported Undine before she was able to pay her own way.

What had she ever done to earn that money? Nothing. She is a leech.

Impractical Undine, foolish dreamer, did not deserve what Daddy had given her.

Ursula is a taker, though she takes only what others have
but don't deserve.

Now Undine is relieved to see which gun Ursula draws from the picnic cooler. She pretends indifference, but her relief is obvious.

Although she barely has the strength to stand, though her twin has all the power and she has none, Undine can't resist taunting her jailer. She says what she has been forbidden to say, in spite of the pain that it will bring her.

She says, “I forgive you.”

The gun is an instrument of control, not of death. Compressed air propels bursts of hard rubber pellets, three at a time.

The first barrage plinks Undine's throat. The pellets sting fiercely.

In fact, they sting so bad that they prick her voice as if it were a balloon, and she can speak no words, is able to issue only a brief whistle-hiss of escaping air.

The second barrage scores her upper lip and left cheek.

Undine drops to the mattress as if knocked down by a hammer.

How satisfying it would be to strike her with such a weapon. But not yet.

Fluorescent light lacks the warmth of sunshine, but Ursula knows that it finds a different beauty in her.

She steps closer to her sister, towering over the fallen woman in the hard white light.

She is an arctic goddess, deity of ice and snow and bone-chilling cold, the light revealing such an exquisite grace that no eye can look away even though the sight of her might freeze-blind anyone who stares too long.

This same light is not kind to Undine. Gaunt, pale, greasy, she lies like a broken hag, abashed at the glory of her twin.

Red welts mark the places where the pellets struck her face, swelling as would the work of wasps, her mouth misshapen as her upper lip distends.

The fallen woman raises her spread hands to protect her face, her eyes.

Two barrages bite her exposed palms.

Her stung fingers twitch and clutch wildly, as if they are the legs of albino spiders.

“You left at fifteen,” Ursula says.

Undine cowers in guilt.

“I stayed,” Ursula says.

Undine knows this litany, knows the truth of it.

“You never came back except for their funerals. I never left. I did everything. You did nothing.”

Their mother, Francine, was no good at loving, but she
demanded
to be loved, to be given affection and companionship.

From childhood, Undine did not give what Mother wanted, but kept to her books, her drawing, hiding from the woman by pretending to be otherworldly, lost in fantasies, a dreamy soul who couldn't focus on the grittier things Mother enjoyed.

It is Ursula who was forced to share Mother's passion for horses. Ursula
loathes
horses. Filthy, frightening beasts.

Yet from a young age she had no choice but to pretend to adore them. Groom them. Ride them.

It is Ursula who was required to learn archery and skeet shooting, because Mother enjoyed—and excelled—at both.

As a child, Ursula was terrified of guns. Not now.

It is Ursula who had no choice but to learn tennis, although the sport bored her. She had no talent for it.

It is Ursula who had to endure endless sets of tennis with Mother, who played aggressively and always won, always crowed about winning, always criticized her daughter for poor coordination.

Now, as Undine turns her face to the mattress, Ursula steps close and fires three bursts of rubber pellets at the back of her sister's head.

“I did everything. You did nothing.”

It is Ursula who bided her time, who planned with such great care, who engineered the “accident” with the horse. Like this:

Three days each week, she is expected to go riding with Mother. These rides are portrayed as little adventures, girl time, but they are a bitter duty that if shirked brings on many subtle punishments.

Her mother is competitive. Often the ride turns into a race.

There are three trails that they regularly follow. One of these includes a lonely field bisected by a narrow drainage ditch.

The horses know the trail. They are trained to jump on command.

In this field, the ride
always
becomes a race.

A cool day. Overcast. Both riders wear light, roomy jackets.

Ursula has added two sturdy interior pockets to her jacket. In the first is an air pistol that shoots small lead pellets.

She conspires to trail closely behind Mother as they approach the drainage ditch.

Francine calls back to her daughter, supposedly encouraging her but in fact mocking.

Ursula draws the pistol. Fires three quick rounds. One hits the intended target, Mother's mare—Saffron—in the rump.

Stung, the horse breaks stride and rears, sees the ditch, but is unable to obey the jump command.

Mother holds tight, goes down with her mare.

Saffron rolls. On Mother. Scrambles up. Trots away, frightened and confused, blowing noisily.

Mother lies on her back in the wild grass, one arm across her breast, the other flung out to one side.

Ursula dismounts, pockets the pistol, and hurries to Mother, hoping for a broken neck.

It isn't that easy.

Mother's left leg is queerly bent and clearly fractured. She has rapped her head on the ground, in the fall, and is dazed.

From the second interior pocket of her jacket, Ursula removes a horseshoe. Using the nail holes, she had earlier attached to this shoe two lengths of sturdy wire.

Mother begins to regain her senses, bitterly cursing the pain.

As Ursula sits on the ground to wire the horseshoe to the bottom of her right boot, Mother shrieks at her to get help, damn it, to go now, now, hurry,
go, go, go.

Ursula stands. She raises her right foot.

Mother's eyes widen.

Ursula stomps as hard as she can on Mother's exposed throat.

It works. Just the one time is all that's needed.

Ursula removes the wire, walks about fifty yards away, and throws it in the ditch. She pockets the horseshoe.

She leaves her horse, Jasmine, and climbs onto Saffron, who has settled sufficiently to be mounted.

Her excuse for riding home on Saffron is that Mother's horse is faster than her own.

How she weeps and wails when she delivers the news. Mother is horribly injured. She may be dying. Ursula is distraught, half wild with grief.

Nearly everyone rushes off overland in SUVs and a pickup.

The two servants remaining with Ursula cannot console her. She insists that she must do something for Mother, but all she can do is see to Saffron. At her tearful insistence, the servants allow her to tend to the mare alone in the stable.

Saffron is a sweetheart. She neither kicks nor becomes skittish when, with a penknife, Ursula pops from her rump the one lead pellet and treats the tiny wound with antiseptic.

Ursula removes the mare's tack, rubs her down, conducts her to her stall, and ties on a feedbag.

The horse seems grateful. Ursula can understand why.

She never rides a horse again. How could she do so when a horse killed her beloved mother?

Now, in the factory basement, speaking to welt-covered Undine, Ursula says, “I did everything. You did nothing.
Nothing.
”

In the fluorescent light that so loves her, she returns to the straight-backed chair, a humble throne for an ice queen.

She puts the pistol in the cooler, beside the other gun.

Chilled, refreshing pinot grigio. She carves the white wedge of champagne cheddar and eats it from the blade of the knife.

Chastened, Undine lies in silence on the mattress.

After a while, Ursula says, “A few days after the funeral, when you had returned to college, I went to Daddy, pretending despair. He wasn't much good as a grief counselor.”

Undine says nothing. Wise of her.

“Trying to cuddle against him was like trying to cuddle up to a scarecrow full of broomsticks and straw. I said that Mother had been so beautiful, that he must have loved her on first sight.”

She eats some cheese.

“You know what he said? He said it wasn't Mother's beauty that he fell for. It was her strength, her power, her competitive nature, her insistence on winning at everything she did.”

The pinot grigio is superb.

“I asked, was I as pretty as Mother, and the unfeeling bastard said, ‘You're a pretty girl, Ursula, but not half as pretty as your mother. No one could be.' ”

Undine turns onto her side, opens her eyes.

Ursula savors the cheese before continuing. “Then he said that I
was
as strong as Mother, maybe stronger, no less determined, no less competitive.”

With her fingertips, Undine gingerly traces the lumpy welts that mar her face.

“Something about the way he said it, something about the look he gave me, I thought the sonofabitch knew I'd killed her.”

Undine has heard much of this before, but not this part.

“I had the feeling that Daddy was relieved to be rid of her. And it's odd, isn't it, how after that I became his favorite girl? How he stopped insisting that I would go to college and instead began to spoil me like he'd never done before.”

Undine closes her eyes.

“But surely he can't have suspected me of killing her. If he had suspected me, wouldn't he also have realized that I might one day be rid of him, too? Well, maybe not. Daddy was a narcissistic bastard. He loved himself so much, he wasn't capable of imagining that anyone didn't admire and adore him.”

Ursula and Undine are both silent for a while. Sisters sharing a bonding moment.

They returned to the Balboa Peninsula residence where Pogo was house-sitting. Pogo didn't own a handgun. Neither did Makani. The owner of the harborside house didn't possess one, either, but he kept a few small canisters of stream-delivery Sabre 5.0, which was pepper spray of a high potency used by law-enforcement and military personnel. They each borrowed a canister.

They traded Makani's customized '54 Chevy street rod for Pogo's off-the-rack thirty-year-old primer-gray Honda. Her wheels were too distinctive, well known to Ursula Liddon and easily spotted even in bustling traffic.

Pogo's battered bucket of bolts, however, was distressed quite by chance in a way certain to trigger the subconscious paranoia that infected Southern California motorists. At first glimpse of the car, they knew—or thought they knew—that its driver would be trouble. Whether posing as a sociopathic loner, a gang member, or a fiery jihadist, he would actually be the latest embodiment of the ancient evil that no one was able to name anymore, that was disturbingly ineffable. Better to pretend you hadn't noticed such a vehicle, and
vital
that you did not look at its driver, lest eye contact be made, leading to road rage, high-speed pursuit, and gunfire.

Bob the dog knew the Honda and felt not in the least diminished to be asked to ride in it. He leaped into the backseat and looked forward eagerly, as if to say,
Let's roll.

As Pogo drove up-peninsula toward the Pacific Coast Highway, Makani used his smartphone, familiarizing herself with the app that Simon had invented for other clients and had this morning customized for Pogo's immediate purpose. Ursula Liddon owned eight sparkling-new expensive automobiles: Ferrari, Maserati, Tesla, Bentley….Simon had hacked the DMV to acquire the motor-vehicle registration numbers. With those, he was able to obtain the unique GPS signal for each car. Unless Ursula thought that starving and murdering a twin sister was a special occasion, she was not currently in her Rolls-Royce, but was still driving the Mercedes convertible, which was her Monday car. Makani chose the icon representing that vehicle, and after a moment, on the screen appeared the words
SUBJECT NOT IN MOTION
, followed by an address, which wasn't that of Ursula Liddon's estate in Newport Coast.

She read the address to Pogo, and he said, “Bit of a drive, kind of a gnarly area.”

“Gnarly how?”

“One of those industrial areas where most businesses moved to Texas like an eon ago.”

California had been legislating its middle class out of jobs and into poverty for years.

“So it's just empty warehouses or something? Doesn't sound full-on gnarly.”

“Unoccupied old buildings tend to find their uses,” Pogo said. “Like wagering on cockfights, dogfights.”

Makani grimaced. “Cruel. And against the law.”

“Lawless is cool these days—didn't you get the memo? It's the kind of area for one-night raves with a bazaar of drugs, bunkhouses for illegal aliens being paid dirt in unlicensed garment industries, word-of-mouth brothels, you name it.”

“What would she be doing there?”

“Let's find out.”

Makani activated the GPS function, and a map appeared on the screen. A blinking green dot represented the location of Pogo's smartphone, as the Honda proceeded along the peninsula's primary street.

From the phone came a cool, collected, yet seductive female voice, which informed them as regarded the distance to their next turn. Then the silken-voiced robogirl said,
“This assistance is provided by Simon Says, your only reliable resource in times of crisis.”

To the east, the afternoon heavens arced as clear as Lalique. To the west were only a few long, low, lumpy stratus clouds and, high above them, several fragile cirrus formations peeling apart like the layers of phyllo-dough pastries.

“How did you meet Simon Hunter, anyway?” Makani asked.

“I was paddleboarding the back bay at like two in the morning—”

“That's not allowed, is it, at that hour?”

“A lot of things aren't allowed. So I was paddleboarding under the bridge and this car stops and Simon comes plunging down so close that the splash wobbles me off my board.”

“He jumped off a bridge?”

“No, they threw him.”

“Who threw him?”

“The guys in the car. Threw him and then took off. He was gagged and tied up, of course, and trammeled hands to feet.”

“This happens right in the heart of Newport Beach?”

“In my experience, not often. One of the mistakes they made was using ropes instead of chains.”

“Which was a mistake—why?”

“In those days, I carried a Swiss Army Knife everywhere.”

“When was this?”

“I was fifteen, like six years ago. These guys were too dumb to be archvillains. Another mistake they made was not weighing him down with a sack of bricks or something.”

“Wouldn't he have drowned anyway?”

“Yeah, but it would have been faster with bricks. I had enough time to get him on my paddleboard and start cutting him loose.”

“Why did they want to kill him?”

“He said they were pissed.”

“Evidently. About what?”

“He never said. I don't need to know.”

“You saved his life.”

“Well, I was there, I didn't have anything else to do.”

From the smartphone, robogirl informed them that they would be crossing Coast Highway in two hundred yards and continuing straight ahead for three-quarters of a mile. Then she declared,
“Simon Says is your only reliable resource in times of crisis.”

Makani said, “Why did you used to carry a Swiss Army Knife everywhere?”

“I was a kid. It had seventeen tools with twenty-six functions. I thought as long as I had one, I could deal with anything.”

“And you did. You saved Simon.”

“That's the only time it was ever useful. Well, except for opening beer bottles.”

“You shouldn't have been drinking beer at fifteen.”

“Don't mom me,
wahine
.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Sorry. I guess you've grown up to be a solid citizen.”

“Let's not go that far.”

After reading the instructions on the label of the little canister of Sabre 5.0, Makani said, “This seems lame.”

“It isn't a gun, it isn't much, but it isn't lame. And we have Bob on our side.”

“I don't want Bobby to get hurt.”

“No sweat. If it looks like someone needs to be bitten, I'll do it for him.”

After robogirl informed them of an imminent turn, Makani said, “I'm glad I've got you.”

He flashed a smile at her. “I'm glad I've got you, too.”

She said, “You're my Swiss Army Knife.”