Final Hour (Novella) (4 page)

The basement of the factory lies under the thick floor of the main work area, which is an effective lid to prevent all sound from rising out of the rooms below.

Ursula finishes descending the second of two wide flights of stairs that lead to a fireproof steel door.

Webs have been spun where treads and risers form tight corners, but there are no spiders on the stairs, as though none would dare attend her.

She is aware of the grace and authority with which she moves even in this drab place, in these dismal circumstances.

There is a freight elevator in a fireproof shaft, but it no longer functions.

With a key, she disengages the deadbolt. The heavy door swings smoothly, easily on ball-bearing hinges.

Another wall switch. More overhead panels of fluorescent tubes.

The ceiling is high for a subterranean space, about eleven feet. The walls are poured-in-place steel-reinforced concrete.

Even small noises should echo off these hard surfaces, but they do not. An unnatural silence rules, as if this is the one place on Earth where, at the end of time, all sounds will come to die.

This dungeon—for it is a dungeon that the hideous Undine deserves—has no windows.

The ductwork that brings air from the main floor contains a series of filters that muffle all cries for help. Those cries are further repressed by the continuous
whoosh
of the fans that force air through the ducts.

Daddy had been a man of foresight. He built a fortune. And it seems as if he'd known that his favorite daughter, Ursula, would need a prison like this for the abomination that is her twin sister.

Daddy was only fifty-six when he died three years ago.

She doesn't exactly miss him.

But she often feels his absence. Like a tooth that has been pulled and not replaced with an implant. An abscessed tooth.

The basement contains a series of large rooms. All are separated from the hallways by thick, fireproof steel doors.

Some rooms had housed enormous boilers that, if a pressure regulator failed, might have exploded.

Other rooms once contained equally dangerous equipment, though she had never bothered to learn what any of it had been.

She imagines massive vats of dangerous acid, forges full of molten metal, towering pressurized tanks of liquefied gases that, if accidentally released, might bring instant death to all who breathed the fumes….

Her father had been a greedy man who wanted everything his eyes beheld.

He would have risked every life within a mile radius if he could have made a dollar.

Daddy is the reason Ursula despises greed.

The thing one remembers about an abscessed tooth is the pain. Although the absence of the tooth is felt, the pain is not missed.

All of the boilers and other dangerous equipment are gone, stripped out and sold for salvage or for scrap.

Behind each door is a large empty space, as if these are the dreary rooms beneath a pyramid erected by a minor pharaoh who lacked the resources to provide for himself the resplendent chambers of a true king's tomb.

Each room is slightly cooler than the one before it.

She doesn't mind the cool air on her bare legs, bare arms. The sun's adoration will be greater than ever when she ascends once more into its light.

Ursula comes to the door of the chamber in which resides the hateful creature who is Undine.

Perhaps the wicked one is dead.

Finding her dead would be satisfactory.

On the other hand, Undine has not yet paid a high enough price for her treachery. The sleazy bitch's punishment is not yet complete.

Undine is the greediest of the greedy.

Ursula unlocks the door, flicks on the lights, stands watching the creature with whom she had once shared a womb.

There is a mattress on the floor. A chemical toilet. A couple of cases of bottled water.

Those are the only amenities within Undine's reach.

They are more than she deserves.

Undine is secured by a steel manacle around her left foot. A chain leads from the manacle to a ringbolt firmly embedded in the floor.

In preparation for this righteous imprisonment, Ursula had installed the ringbolt and prepared the space.

A few feet beyond Undine's reach stands a straight-backed chair. Ursula sets the picnic cooler on the floor beside it.

Undine lies on her side on the mattress, wearing the blah slacks and blah blouse—off the rack from some third-rate retailer—that she'd been wearing when she had come to dinner at Ursula's home sixteen days earlier.

“Don't pretend, baby sister,” says Ursula, as she sits on the chair. “I know you're not sleeping.”

Ursula is fifty seconds older than Undine. But decades wiser.

Undine opens her eyes. They are the blue of her twin's eyes.

At one time, looking at Undine was like looking in a mirror.

After more than two weeks without food, Undine is pale. Dark circles around the eyes. A hollowness in the cheeks.

Her hair is oily, lank. She stinks of stale sweat.

She is no longer Ursula's equal in appearance. If she ever was. She always has lacked a certain…vivacity.

Undine will become more ghastly day by day, until her exterior matches her interior. That will be a kind of justice.

“Stand up,” Ursula commands.

From hard experience, Undine knows what will happen to her if she disobeys.

She rolls off the mattress, chain rattling. Gets on her hands and knees. Head hung, she pauses.

There is about the woman an air of deep weariness, of defeat.

Ursula leans forward in expectation of her sister's weeping.

But Undine holds back her tears. She struggles to her feet.

“Dizzy?” Ursula inquires.

There are consequences for not answering questions. Therefore, Undine says, “Yes. Dizzy.”

Her voice is weak. Thin. Self-pitying? Perhaps. But not enough to satisfy her sister.

“Dizziness is from a vitamin B-twelve deficiency. Anemia,” Ursula explains. “Ringing in your ears?”

“Yes.”

“B-twelve again. Cramping in your legs?”

“Yes.”

“Potassium deficiency. No organ failure so far, but that will be coming. Do you want to die yet?”

“No.”

“You'll want it soon enough.”

Ursula is the practical sister. She plans. Considers cause and effect, measures one strategy against another. Reason, facts, and figures guide her.

Undine is the dreamer. A poet and painter, successful in each medium. She favors emotion over reason. She has always been praised for her imagination.

Yet she'd been incapable of imagining that, on the evening she visited her sister, her wine would be spiked with chloral hydrate.

She had awakened in this place, chained.

Now Ursula takes from the cooler a split of fine pinot grigio kept chilled by blue-gel cold packs. A wedge of Dietz & Watson champagne cheddar. A small knife.

The cooler also contains two guns.

She peels the wax rind from the cheese and carves small pieces for herself.

Undine watches. She will be punished if she does not watch.

Eating slivers of cheddar from the blade of the knife, drinking wine from the bottle, Ursula is as pleased by the unrefined manner in which she consumes those treats as she is by the taste of them.

The sensitive Undine has always thought, although she never dared to boldly say, that Ursula is inelegant, coarse, even crude and vulgar.

But who has the cheese and wine, and who does not?

“The trouble with you,” Ursula declares, “is you didn't know how good you had it.”

Undine says nothing. Part of her punishment is to be instructed in her shortcomings.

“The trouble with you, Undine, is that you've always had too high an opinion of yourself. You've thought you're smarter than you are. You aren't smart at all.”

A little cheese. A little wine. A little spite and retribution. Quite a satisfying meal.

Ursula continues: “The trouble with you is that you've had it all, and yet you want even more.”

Undine's legs are trembling with the effort to remain on her feet. She says, “I forgive you for this.”

“I've told you, an apology won't get you anywhere with me, not anywhere at all.”

“I'm not apologizing. I forgive you for what you're doing.”

“Don't go there again,” Ursula warns her. “Don't you dare.”

During a long silence, Ursula reins in her temper.

Dealing with Undine has always been infuriating. She had been an impossible child, so certain of her virtue and too pleased by it. In truth, she is a greedy bitch.

Undine dares to say again, “I forgive you.”

After putting down the wine and cheese and knife, Ursula takes from the picnic cooler one of the guns.

Pogo's moods, whether good or bad, were not easily aggravated by events. He was not placid, but calm and steady; not by any means dispassionate, but generally serene. In Makani's company, he found that he was even markedly more self-possessed than usual. Maybe she had brought with her from Hawaii the laid-back spirit of the islands. He suspected, however, that she would have had this effect on him if she had been raised in New Jersey. She influenced him because of how she was, what she was, and because of what, together, they might one day become. When he was with her, he was in all circumstances collected.

Even with a woman's life at risk and hero shoes to fill, Pogo and Makani paused for lunch and to review what Simon Michael Hunter, hacker of hackers, had provided to them. Only a goob or a Valley cowboy with no surf sense would throw himself into the waves after being warned that sharks were schooling or, in this case, that a sister-killing Great White Bitch was on the prowl.

Makani had the perverse urge to take lunch in the seaside park along Ocean Boulevard, in Corona del Mar, where she had encountered Ursula Jean Liddon that morning. She thought a visit to the scene might spark in memory some important detail that she had overlooked, and Pogo agreed.

From a pizzeria, they scored a three-cheese pie with crab and black olives, bottles of iced tea, and a bottle of water for the dog. Five minutes later, they were sitting on a bench in the park with a view of the Pacific—and with Bob's rapt attention.

Makani had a rule against giving her canine companion too much human food, but Pogo had a rule against denying him too much. After pouring the water in the dog's collapsible fabric bowl, Pogo gave him two of the narrower slices of the thin-crust pie, which the Labrador consumed with vacuum-cleaner efficiency. The dog was not too proud to beg, but he knew better than to spend more than a few seconds angling for a third slice, whereafter he went to the nearby railing, rested his chin on a horizontal bar, and gazed down at the sea foaming on the shore at the base of the bluff.

As Makani and Pogo ate, with the pizza box on the bench between them, they examined the printouts that Simon had compiled.

Henning Liddon, father of the twins, founder of the family fortune, hadn't merely kept a low profile, but had been as secretive as a Medici pulling the strings of everyone from judges to cardinals in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. He never sat for interviews. His various enterprises were private companies, which meant he didn't have to reveal anything to shareholders. On those few occasions when the business press wrote about him, he was referred to as “unknown and unknowable” or “enigmatic” or “close-mouthed.” He had imposed upon his wife, Francine, and inculcated in their two children his obsession with privacy. When the twins were sixteen, Francine had died in a horse-riding accident on their estate in Montecito, and in the newspaper, her obituary had been as brief as that of any clerk or gardener. There were few photographs of any of the Liddons to be found online in any media archives—until Ursula married Proctor Norquist.

Undine had earned accolades as a poet by the time she was twenty-five and had as well become a successful painter. Yet she said nothing about her family, and the fact of the Liddon fortune did not enter her official biography until her twin sister married at the age of twenty-nine. Even then, little was made of Undine's heritage; she was seen as a contented loner with simple needs, living for her art.

Perhaps Ursula didn't value privacy as much as did Undine or their father; perhaps she even resented the anonymity that had been her lot until she married Norquist. After their marriage, however, when she began to show up with him at charity galas, the photos in the glossy lifestyle magazines (included in Simon's file) revealed not just a woman of stunning beauty, but also, at the edges and in the corners of her marvelous face, something that might have been anxiety about—or only impatience with—the attention that she was receiving.

“I don't think she really wanted to be at all these charity events,” Pogo said. “She's for sure not like Frankie, all wound up about Jarvis's wedding.”

“Frankie who, what Jarvis?”

“From a novel.
The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers.”

“I don't know when you have time to read so much.”

“I don't know when I wouldn't.”

Recalling what she had read by touch of skin to skin that morning, Makani said, “Ursula's no more charitable than a snake.”

The day was warm, the sun insistent, but Makani shivered.

“Look at Norquist in these photos. He's showing her off, don't you think?” Pogo studied Ursula's face again. “She's enduring it, but she's not happy.”

“She only had to endure it a little while,” Makani said as Pogo turned the page and revealed the newspaper article about J. Proctor Norquist's drug overdose. “Seems as if there's a sad tendency for people in her life to die before their time. How did her old man kick off?”

Henning Liddon's obituary was the next page in Simon's file.

Scanning the obit, Pogo said, “Three years ago.”

“Did he fall off a tall ladder?”

“Says here, he was fifty-six.”

“Car brakes fail?” Makani wondered. “Set himself on fire while barbecuing? Accidentally shoot himself while hunting?”

“He'd been under treatment for a heart condition since he was fifty. Massive heart attack.”

“Would there have been an autopsy?”

“Probably not. I don't think they bother doing one if you die from a preexisting condition.”

“They should have done one.”

“Totally,” Pogo agreed.

Bob the dog returned from his contemplation of the sea, bumped open the lid of the pizza box with his nose, and snorted in disgust when he discovered not one slice left.

Makani said, “Uncle Pogo has spoiled my Bobby.”

The dog wagged his tail as though the word
spoiled
inspired hope.

Pogo reversed through the pages to study the photographs of Ursula. “You were so right that she's a major hottie. Smokin' hot.”

“Oh, good. So now you can trust me to pick out girls for you.”

He shook his head. “I'm too wise to respond to that with a smart-ass comeback.”

“Too wise or just unable to think of one? Anyway, she's hot but she's hard.”

“I have a
great
comeback for that one.”

“Because you're twenty-one going on fourteen. I'm serious. She is perfect, she really is, but she has this gloss about her….”

“Gloss?”

After chewing on her lip, thinking about what she meant, Makani said, “It's such a
polished
beauty, way polished, you know? Not that she's had a surgeon's help, she's real enough, über-real. It's just that…she almost has this shine to her, the hard shine like a newly waxed surfboard, like polyester resin or something.”

Take polyester resin, a liquid plastic, mix it with the proper catalyst and accelerator, and you had the hard outer skin that sheathed the foam core of a modern surfboard.

“Smooth, sleek,” Makani said, “glimmering, irresistible, but with hidden hooks.”

“You make her sound like a fishing lure.”

“Is that what I meant? I think it is. The way she was dressed this morning, the way she ran—certain she was watched,
wanting
to be watched. Like she was out to catch something.”

The final item in Simon Hunter's file was a lifestyle magazine article about Ursula Norquist having eight expensive cars. She used a different one for each day of the week—a list of days and cars was provided—and a Rolls-Royce for special occasions. She posed for photos with the collection, no doubt at her husband's insistence. The way she dressed, few men who came across the article would pay much attention to the cars.

“Simon said this was how we could pretty much know where she was at all times,” Makani said. “That app he loaded on your phone.”

Pogo took his smartphone from a pocket and gave it to her. “See if you can find her.”

“Cool,” she said, accepting the phone.

Again Bob nosed open the pizza box.

It remained empty.

As the lid fell into place again, the Labrador sighed.

Although the dog's persistent hope should have amused Pogo, it did not.

For some reason, he thought of Makani's hope of living a normal life in spite of her terrible gift.

More often than not, whenever she touched someone, she was in a sense opening a box. But she could have no expectation of something good, like a three-cheese pizza with crab and black olives.

Each box she opened had the potential to be a coffin. Her own.

Pogo almost wished he didn't love her.

He was good at surfing, at pretending to be intellectually stunted, at house-sitting, at making friends, at reading books and
getting
them on many levels.

But one of the things he wasn't good at was loss. He couldn't handle losing people. He
stank
at that. He was pathetic when it came to accepting that death was natural, a part of life.

He almost wished he didn't love Makani, but he did. Profoundly.

Again, Bob nosed open the pizza box. Empty. He turned his gaze to Pogo.

Neither disappointment nor entreaty colored Bob's eyes. Dogs were uncannily intuitive. The Labrador's steady stare was solemn, even grave, and lit with sympathy, as if he knew that Pogo was no good at dealing with loss—and pitied him.