Final Hour (Novella) (6 page)

Ursula waits to discover if this might be the final hour of her sister's life.

Undine's behavior will determine whether she dies days hence by starvation—or by a bullet in her perfect blond head just minutes from now.

Only rarely is Ursula given to profound philosophical thoughts. There are a thousand more interesting ways to be bored.

However, sitting quietly while her silent sister lies sullen and despairing on the filthy mattress, in the hush of the factory basement, Ursula thinks that nature is not perfect, as the pagans and the ecologists believe; nature makes mistakes.

Identical twins are no less an error of nature than is a calf born with two heads.

In fact, twins are the greater error.

Ursula's singular beauty isn't singular as long as there is another exactly like her. Twins of breathtaking grace and flawless form are too much of a good thing.

One calf with two heads is singular.

Ursula and Undine are redundant. The little sister, just by being, diminishes Ursula.

She will not allow herself to be diminished.

She has one life, and she will be the only one to have it.

Greedy Undine wants her own life
and
Ursula's. She plays a sly game, faking humility, affecting a taste for simplicity. But she wants it all.

Undine really seems to have believed that by pretending to be a paragon of forbearance, by responding to cruelty with absolution, she would win her freedom.

I forgive you, Ursula. I forgive you. I forgive you for what you've done. I love you and forgive you.

Such has been her unconvincing—patently absurd!—strategy to win release for these past sixteen days.

At first, Ursula was amused.

But not for long.

Greedy Undine wants everything that is Ursula's, wants to grow fat at Ursula's expense. Therefore, she has been starved thin.

Ursula hopes to break Undine. To force her admission of her true intentions.

But she grows weary waiting for her evil twin's confession.

Four days previous, Undine almost went too far, tried to sell one lie that was too outrageous to be borne. Infuriated, Ursula had plucked the more deadly pistol from the cooler, had almost shot her in the face.

Since then, Undine has dialed back her performance.

Currently she seems to think that silence will save her.

Daddy knew the ugly truth of Undine. Daddy left everything to Ursula, requiring only that Undine receive a fair annual allowance.

Although Ursula is more than fair, Undine isn't satisfied. She says the wretched economy has impacted the sale of her paintings. Oh, dear impoverished poet! Oh, great artist reduced to penury!

Undine claims only to be seeking an increase in her allowance, a payoff of the mortgage on her “cottage.”

What she calls a cottage would be called a palace by the poor multitudes of the world.

In truth, the greedy pig, frustrated by Daddy's will, is eager to get at the trough. She came to kill Ursula.

She will never confess. She is incapable of giving Ursula the satisfaction of groveling, confessing, and begging for her life.

Undine is a mistake of nature. A freak, born fifty seconds after the true and rightful heir to the Liddon fortune.

From the cooler, Ursula withdraws the lethal firearm.

The once prosperous district was a reminder of California's golden past, but also a preview of a possible future of blight, decay, and disorder. Empty lots where shifts of workers had once parked. Peeling stucco. Crumbling masonry. Some windows broken, others boarded. Block after block, the buildings in which working people had once built dignified lives now seemed to stand subtly askew, as though tweaked slightly but repeatedly, repeatedly, by earthquakes that no one felt, in preparation for a quick collapse when the Big One came. Everywhere, the torqued and slightly canted architecture was testament to bad ideas enforced with all the best intentions. Here where working people had once thrived, the ideas of their self-appointed betters came to die, an idea graveyard that reminded Pogo why he had never wanted to presume to tell others how they should live or what was best for them.

As in the backseat Bob yawned, Pogo pulled the Honda to a stop in front of a chain-link gate, and robogirl spoke from the phone:
“You have arrived. Please remember that Simon Says is your only reliable resource in times of crisis.”

Fifty yards beyond the fence, between two large buildings, stood a silver Mercedes convertible.

Makani said, “She's here, all right. Does this feel like a place where someone would imprison a sister in a windowless room?”

“The whole neighborhood looks like it was built just for that purpose,” Pogo said.

The pistol contains ten rounds.

Ursula sits with it on her taut, perfectly smooth, perfectly proportioned bare thighs, watching her twin lying upon the mattress, hag-ugly, filthy, defeated, but still scheming.

She likes the feel of the gun.

She has never killed with one before. She has never needed a gun for that.

Now she needs the pistol, needs it so much that the desire to use it fills her with exquisite tremors of erotic pleasure.

Undine opens her eyes. She watches Ursula, the gun, watches with animal cunning and desperate hope.

“Do you really forgive me?” Ursula asks.

She wants to induce her evil twin to proceed from the absurd claims of absolution to the bigger lie that almost got her killed four days earlier. When Undine says those words again, Ursula will shoot the bitch in her lying mouth.

“Do you really, really forgive me, Undine?”

Pogo said, “O'Brien, would you open the glove box and hand me the knife?”

“What knife?” Makani asked as she pressed the button-style latch release, but then she saw the Swiss Army Knife as the lid dropped open.

“I don't carry it everywhere anymore,” he said. “But I try to keep it handy. Never know when someone might be thrown off a bridge. Wait here.”

He got out of the car, scaled the gate, landed on his feet on the other side, as agile as he was good-looking. He knelt next to the metal housing that protected the motor and the two wheels of the chain drive that operated the gate.

She didn't know which of the twenty-six functions provided by the seventeen small tools he might have used. But in two minutes, he removed part of the housing; he must have crossed the right wires, because the big gate shuddered and then began to roll aside.

To Bob, Makani said, “I don't know how that man and I are going to make it work between us, what with this witchy power of mine and with him having no privacy every time I touch him. But one way or another, Bobby, that fella out there is going to be your papa someday.”

Bob whined happily, as if he understood.

Although she sits quite still, Ursula has an acute awareness of her potential for speed. In a T-shirt and short shorts and running shoes, she is a hurricane wind waiting for the storm to gather itself. She is lightning waiting to flash.

The gun bridges her thighs, and her hands flank the gun.

Her thighs feel so warm under the palms of her hands.

Her ceaselessly moving hands feel so strong on her thighs.

She is the master of her world, this world. She needs no one but herself. She certainly doesn't need another Ursula named Undine.

“Do you, Undine? Do you really, really forgive me?”

As Ursula repeats the question insistently, Undine raises her head from the mattress.

The wicked twin knows which of the two handguns lies across her sister's thighs. And yet perhaps she dares to hope.

Ursula says, “When you started racing through high school, one year ahead of me, then suddenly two, I went to bed every damn night wishing you'd have a stroke or a brain hemorrhage, anything to make you stupid.”

Undine has never heard of this before. Interested, perhaps wondering where this confession will lead, she sits up.

“I'd lie there in bed for an hour, longer, just seething at the injustice, wishing you brain damage. You had no right to be smarter than me. We're supposed to be identical.”

Sitting with her legs splayed, as a child might sit, Undine plants one hand to each side, flat against the mattress, as though she might swoon backward if she didn't brace herself.

“You never did anything to earn your smarts. I envied you, envied your intelligence. Why shouldn't I? Greedy people have what they don't deserve. I have always—
always
—despised people who have what they don't deserve.”

Undine's dirty, tangled hair has fallen across her face. She glares between those greasy, golden strands, her evil manifest in her blue eyes. Such a fierce blue.

“When you
flew
through college and went off to live on your own and write and paint, and I remained under Daddy's roof, under his thumb, I no longer wished you'd have a stroke and be struck stupid. I wished you dead. I wished you dead a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand.”

Resorting once more to the strategy that previously had failed her, Undine speaks in a voice marked as much by compassion as by the pain of starvation and by weariness. “It's all right. I understand. I really do. I love you. Why wouldn't I? My sister. My only sister. I forgive you.”

This is what Ursula wants.

This false kindness.

This insincere clemency.

This thickly poured syrup, this treacle of phony mercy.

It infuriates her. It justifies her. It brings them toward the most outrageous of all Undine's lies from four days ago, the lie that, if she repeats it, will be her final deception, the last words she ever speaks.

Ursula goads her. “I've done such cruel things. Look at you, what I've done to you, what a mess you are now. And I've enjoyed it, Undine. I've enjoyed every sweet minute of it.”

Pogo parked the Honda just inside the property, facing the street, and closed the gate.

Makani thought perhaps they should leave Bob safely in the car, but Pogo wanted him with them. There was a bond between the Labrador and this special woman that seemed greater than that of just a dog and master, which might have something to do with her paranormal talent, even if she couldn't read animals at a touch. Pogo sensed that Bob wouldn't go full-on dog at the wrong moment, wouldn't bark and give them away or scamper off after a scent of interest to him but unrelated to their purpose here. As a surfer who had long been able to intuit which wave in a set would be worth standing for the ride, he had learned to trust his hunches.

They hurried to the Mercedes, which was parked in the deep-purple shadow of a large building, within ten feet of a man-size door. When Pogo tried the door, it proved to be unlocked. Beyond, revealed by banks of overhead lamps, lay a vast vacant room, as dreary as an abandoned bunker from a long-ago lost war.

With the canister of pepper spray clutched in his right hand, forefinger under the flip-up guard, he was prepared to press the firing mechanism. Makani was ready with her canister, too.

Pogo felt a little foolish, as if they were taking water pistols to a firefight. In retrospect, he realized that he should at least have armed himself with the fisherman's gaff from the yacht on which he had earlier been lounging, or the tire iron from the Honda.

Armed with dog breath and a lot of teeth, Bob squirmed between them, past Pogo, and went first into the building.

“You haven't forgiven me,” Ursula says. “We were carried in the same womb, fed the same mother's milk, grew up at the knee of the same father. You aren't capable of forgiveness any more than I am.”

“I know you won't let me go,” Undine says. “I've resigned myself to that.”

She sits there splay-legged, defeated, a ragged broken doll.

“I've resigned myself to death,” she says softly.

“You've resigned yourself to nothing, Undine. You're always scheming. That's how you've always been. I
know
you.”

“I'm resigned,” Undine repeats. “So it's either anger or pity, bitterness or forgiveness. I don't want to die angry and bitter.”

The bitch is going to go there again, go for the big lie that will earn her a bullet through the teeth and out the back of her head.

From a pocket of her shorts, Ursula fishes out the little key that will unlock the manacle binding Undine's ankle. There is an opportunity for one last delicious bit of torment.

With the pistol in her right hand, she rises from the chair.

Undine is a vain creature. As she gazes up at her radiant sister, Ursula's unblemished perfection must be a choking grief to her now, a piercing reminder of the repulsive wretch she has become.

“The only difference between us,” Ursula says, “is that you're driven by greed that you conceal behind all your poet bullshit, all your sensitive-artist bullshit. I despise greed, especially yours, when I've done everything to earn what I have, and you've done nothing.”

This rant inspires Undine to rise shakily to her feet.

The moment approaches.

This is the final minute of the final hour.

Behind filthy ropes of hair, Undine's haggard face contorts with a pretense of having been offended—more than offended, deeply wounded—by having her virtue questioned, her motivations impugned.

“Admit the truth about yourself, Undine.” She holds up the manacle key between thumb and forefinger. “Admit the truth, and I will set you free.”

Undine stares at the key so hungrily that it might be food.

“Admit the truth. It's just that easy.”

But Undine knows she will never be set free. Besides, Ursula is such a pathological liar that the taste of truth is too repulsive for her to speak a word of it.