An Eye for an Eye

leigh brackett

an eye for an eye

Grace Vitelli stuck her head in through the door and said, “I’m going home now, Mr. Forbes.” Ben Forbes turned around from the window where he was standing. He smiled at Grace, who was a nice woman. “And I wish I could say the same.”

“I was just wondering,” Grace said, “if Mrs. Forbes could have misunderstood the time.”

Ben shook his head. “She asked me this morning if this was going to be one of my late days, and I told her no, to pick me up at the usual time. She wouldn’t mistake that.”

“Oh well,” said Grace, “I expect she’ll be here pretty soon.”

“I expect so. I just hope she hasn’t had any trouble with the car.”

“If you’d like me to try your house again—”

“No, she’s obviously on her way,” Ben said. “Probably ran into some kind of a traffic jam. Thanks anyway. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She left the inner door slightly ajar. He heard her cross the outer office and open the door into the hall and close it again behind her. The sound of her high heels went clicking away and was gone. The office was quiet. Ben looked at his watch. It was three minutes past five-thirty on the afternoon of Thursday, the eighth of November. Carolyn was almost thirty-five minutes late. Forty, if you took into account her tendency to get everywhere just a little ahead of time.

Ben turned back to the window. He was a tall, rather lanky young man, with a surprising amount of bulk in the shoulders left over from his football days. He had light brown hair in a crew cut and light brown eyes with a friendly expression. There was nothing particularly distinguished or handsome about him, but nearly everybody liked him. He was a good lawyer, quite a bit better than he gave himself credit for, and everybody said that he would never have got anywhere without Carolyn to supply the push. Ben knew that everybody said this and he knew that it was about ninety per cent true. Carolyn, quite amazingly, did not believe it at all. She took it as a reflection on Ben’s ability and got very hot if such a thing was mentioned.

Ben looked morosely down into the street and tried to see what cars were turning into the alley that led to the parking lot.

His office was on the second floor of an old three-story building occupied almost exclusively by lawyers. Directly across the street was Courthouse Square, where the large dingy imposing bulk of the courthouse loomed in unfamiliar nakedness now that the surrounding trees had lost their leaves.

It was already growing dark. Lights burned in the courthouse windows. People moved back and forth behind them, filing papers, putting on their coats, getting ready to go. A thin band of yellow still showed low in the west, bright against the cold sky. Rush-hour traffic was heavy. The suburbanites of Woodley, Ohio, were closing up shop and hiking for home and dinner.

Cars came out of the alley, but he could not see any turning in. He said a word or two in sharp ill-temper, thinking of the hard day he had had and how much he wanted to get home and relax. Then he caught himself. It was rather childish to feel abused because he had to wait for a few minutes. Something had delayed Carolyn, and it was just one of those things.

He lighted a cigarette. Best way in the world to bring somebody, he thought. Light a cigarette and they always come before you can smoke it.

He smoked it and listened to the last sounds of exodus in the building around him. The yellow color in the sky faded rapidly to gray. When the cigarette had burned down to the filter he went to the desk and put it out in the big brass ash tray. It was nine minutes to six.

He began to fidget.

Could she, after all, have mistaken the time? Human fallibility. His hours did vary wildly according to the demands of his work. She might have thought he said six.

He reviewed the early morning, breakfast, the ride into town. Carolyn in that red plaid robe that made the grayest morning bright, yawning over her coffee and asking, “Will you be late or regular today?” Carolyn in her tweed coat, her brown hair brushed and shining and her blue eyes smiling at him as she kissed him good-by in the parking lot and said, “I’ll pick you up at five, then.” And he had said, “At five.”

No. No, she wouldn’t have mistaken that.

Two minutes to six.

Accident.

Ugly, inevitable word when someone you expect does not come.

No, it’s too early to panic. Besides, there are all kinds of accidents. Flat tires. Banged fenders. Skids into ditches. Motor failure. Lots of things. Carolyn is a good driver, a careful driver. She’s never had an accident.

But if it’s just some minor thing, why doesn’t she call and let me know?

Five after six, and full dark.

Why doesn’t she call?

The office gathered silence into itself under the too tall and too narrow box of its ceiling papered in white to make it less shadowy, between the tall pale-green surfaces of its walls.

Ten after six.

Why on earth doesn’t she call!

Most of the lights in the courthouse windows had gone out. Traffic had begun to slacken. There was something very lonely and unpleasant about being left behind like this. Ben had been in his office at this hour many times before, but then he had stayed on purpose. He had been working and he had known exactly where Carolyn was. That was normal. This was not.

In the excessive quiet of the building he heard someone come in through the back entrance and he thought, There’s Carolyn now. A great wave of relief went through him. He jumped up and went through the outer office and flung open the hall door.

The footsteps on the main floor, clearly audible now, did not approach the stairs. A door opened down below. There was a noise of buckets and cleaning tools being moved around. It was not Carolyn.

The nerves in Ben’s middle tightened with a sharp pain. He went slowly back to his office. A sudden fury possessed him, a fury against Carolyn that she would frighten him like this. He made himself stand still and light a cigarette with slow deliberate motions. There was a coppery taste in his mouth that made the smoke unpleasant. I am angry, he thought, because I’m worried, and I’m worried because it’s Carolyn. If it was somebody else I would only be annoyed at being held up. After all, an hour and fifteen or twenty minutes isn’t so long. It only seems so when you’re waiting and don’t know why. It’s foolish to go into a big sweat about it. Let’s be objective. Carolyn carries identification. If anything really serious, really bad had happened to her, I would have been notified.

So, he told himself, there is nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless, he did not stop worrying.

At twenty minutes past six he called his house. It was a futile gesture, and he had known it would be. The futility of it made him somehow more uneasy. It brought to his mind how long ago Carolyn must have left—around four thirty-five probably, and certainly before five-ten, when Grace had first tried to get her and received no answer. Even if you dragged your feet, the drive in could not take much more than twenty minutes. That was a lot of time to account for.

And what did you do in a situation like this? How soon was it proper to succumb to panic and start calling the police?

He thought, I’ll call the neighbors first.

Dr. Torrence and his wife were out. This was not unusual. They had married children and many friends. But it was maddening to get the empty buzz-buzz of an unanswered phone here too. He called the Pettits.

Louise answered. “Why, yes, Ben,” she said, sounding surprised. “What is it?”

“Carolyn was supposed to pick me up at five, and she hasn’t come yet. I wondered if you—”

“Well, no, I don’t, Ben. I haven’t seen her since this morning. Are you sure she understood the time?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Did you happen to hear when she went out? The car, I mean.”

“No, I didn’t. I was busy getting dinner started and the kids had the television on, you know how it is. But I think she must have gone all right. I was out feeding the dog a little while ago and I noticed there weren’t any lights in your place. I thought at the time you people were late getting home.”

Suddenly it seemed to dawn on her that he was alarmed, and with reason.

“Gee, Ben,” she said, “is there anything I can do? Would you like me to send Johnny over to look around?”

He hesitated. Then he said, “If you would. I’d appreciate it—”

“Sure, Ben. Sure. Call you back.”

He hung up and sat for a minute staring at the phone. Then he called the police station.

He knew some of the men there. He had gone through high school with three or four of them, detectives and uniformed cops both. But he did not try to get hold of anyone in particular. He identified himself to the desk sergeant and explained the situation. He gave a description of his wife. Then he waited while they checked. It was now well past six-thirty. He should have been ravenously hungry. Instead he had the familiar sickness that comes with nerves. His hands were very cold and sweat kept forming on the inner surfaces of them so that he constantly had to wipe them. His heart beat in a great hollow space inside his ribs like someone pounding a hammer in a cave.

The sergeant’s voice spoke with agonizing loudness in his ear. “No, we don’t have any report on a woman of that name or description. Have you tried your wife’s family, all her friends, places she goes to? Sometimes—”

“Yes,” said Ben. “Thank you. I’ll try around.” He hung up. He closed his eyes and thought, No report, thank God for that.

And now what?

Think of all the places Carolyn might be. Her parents in Pittsburgh? Hardly. Places she goes to? The sergeant had obviously been thinking of taverns, but Carolyn wasn’t that kind and she didn’t have any hard-drinking girl friends, either. There simply were not any places in which she could logically or illogically be, no people she would be with. Not under these circumstances. Not Carolyn.

But she’s got to be somewhere.

The phone rang, shrill and strident as a scream.

It was Johnny Pettit.

“I just took a fast look through the house, Ben. The back door was open and I thought you wouldn’t mind. I thought, well, perhaps she’d had a fall or something. But she isn’t there.”

And thank God for that, too, thought Ben. I was afraid—

“Listen, Ben, I’ll tell you what. I’ll run in and get you. Be there in about fifteen minutes. Okay?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe I ought to wait here a little longer—”

“Well, I don’t think you have to worry about that, Ben. About Carolyn picking you up, I mean.”

“No?” said Ben. “Why not?” And there was thunder in his ears.

“Well,” said Johnny, “Wherever she is, she’s not driving. Your car is still in the garage.”

He left a note. He stuck it carefully in the crack of the office door when he locked it, so that if Carolyn did come she would know where he had gone. He had called Grace Vitelli, too. Grace had not heard from Carolyn, and she had seemed quite concerned in spite of her efforts to be reassuring. She had asked him if there was anything she could do and he had told her that there was not.

He walked down the hall. It was dimly lighted and somehow ominous. He felt a curious detachment, as though a cloud had come between him and the familiar details of his surroundings, obscuring and twisting them, closing him off from any clear contact. He supposed this was because he had never walked this way under such queer and uncertain circumstances before. The pattern was broken. You did not yet know how deeply.

He descended the stairs, making a hollow clattering that brought the startled janitress out into the hall below. She was a stout, pleasant woman. He had seen her before but he didn’t know what her name was. She made a flapping motion with her hand and said,

“Goodness! I didn’t know there was anybody in the building.”

“I’m just going,” said Ben, and walked past her and forgot her.

Suppose Johnny Pettit looked too fast and simply didn’t see her, lying in some corner or behind a half-open door. Or suppose she’s in the yard somewhere. Oh God, lying in the dark, in the old stream bed at the bottom of the slope, under the trees.

He went out the front entrance, into the biting air and forlorn emptiness of the November streets. He stood by the curb and waited. A few cars passed by, and a few people on foot. There was a smell of coal smoke. The stars overhead, dimmed by city lights and the glow of the mills, were very remote and cold.

He thought, Carolyn’s young and strong. She’s healthy. Things like that don’t happen. At least—

They don’t happen very often.

It was the car still being there that worried him the most. There wasn’t any place you could walk to from the house, except the neighbors’. That was why Carolyn had to have the car. She could hardly have gone away without it.

He formed a strong mental image of Carolyn lying on the ground. He could not make it go away.

Johnny Pettit pulled up to the curb, and Ben got in.

“Are you sure you looked all over the house?” he said.

“Everywhere,” said Johnny. “I turned on all the lights. I even went down-cellar. I looked in the bathroom and everywhere.”

“Did you look in the yard?”

“Well,” said Johnny, “not too carefully, but I flashed the light around all right, and I couldn’t see any sign of anything wrong.”

He turned left around the square and headed east on Market Street. He hit every red light. Ben held his hands tight between his knees and said:

“For God’s sake, can’t you hurry a little?”

“I’m doing the best I can,” said Johnny mildly. He was two or three years older than Ben and doing well in the steel firm where he was a minor executive. He was thin and serious, able if not brilliant, and already getting bald and faintly, just faintly, pompous. He and Ben were friends by chance rather than choice, so that their relationship was pleasant but did not run too deep.

“What do you think has happened to her?” Ben said desperately. “Where could she have gone? Without the car—” He shook his head. “I just don’t understand it.”

“She might have had bad news from home,” Johnny said. They crossed the railroad tracks onto Market Street Extension and began to make better time. There were fewer lights here, and very little traffic.

Ben said, “She’d have let me know.”

“Uh—Ben—” said Johnny.

“What?”

“You and Carolyn haven’t been having any—well, any trouble, have you? Misunderstandings, you know, that sort of thing.”

Ben looked at him. “Why?”

“Well,” said Johnny, “I just thought if she was angry with you she might—”

“No,” said Ben slowly. “She wasn’t angry with me.”

“She couldn’t have—” Johnny paused to clear his throat nervously and then went on in the tone of one who has a duty to say something and is determined to do it. “You have to face these things head on, Ben. Look at all the possibilities. Could she have gone away with someone?”

Very slowly Ben said, “It’s odd, but that’s the one possibility that never entered my head.”

“Now don’t get sore at me, Ben. I didn’t say she had. I was only asking. I’m trying to help, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” said Ben.

He sat stiffly in his corner and Johnny drove in aggrieved silence. They did not speak again until they stopped in front of the Forbes house on Lister Road.

“I left the lights on,” Johnny said. “Just like that.”

Ben got out of the car. “There’s a flashlight in the kitchen. I want to search the grounds. Can you stick around for a few minutes?”

“Of course,” said Johnny. “I’ve got a flashlight in the car. Always carry one.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

Ben went up the walk and into the house. His legs were shaky. He stood inside the door and called, “Carolyn? Carolyn!” His voice fell into the flat silence. The house was empty. It had that certain feel and sound.

He went through it just the same, methodically, and it was as Johnny had said. Carolyn was not there. He thought perhaps she had left a message of some sort. But the phone pad was blank and there was no note propped up on the mantel or on any of the tables. The lunch dishes were washed and racked on the kitchen drainboard, but apparently nothing had been done about starting dinner. Ben picked up the flashlight and went back to Johnny in the yard.

Lister Road had once been open country, before a booming Woodley pushed its suburbs far out into the fields. Some of the houses on it were authentic Western Reserve antiques built when Andrew Jackson was President. The others were everything from Cape Cod cottages to split-level ranch houses, dotted along the road in acreage that varied from flat and treeless meadow to old orchard and woods and rolling pasture, according to the way the original farmland had been broken up.

The Forbes house stood on two acres, mostly level in front, sloping to a stream at the back and comprising a corner of a now largely vanished apple orchard, seven trees that still bore a quantity of gnarly fruit and were so beautiful in the spring that Ben and Carolyn had never had the heart to cut them down. The house itself was ranch-style in fieldstone and white wood, and Carolyn was a demon gardener. She had done the landscaping herself, keeping the front simple but quite formal and letting the back stay rough and natural.

Standing miserably in the dark and the cold wind, Ben looked at the black clumps of evergreens and the twisted branches of the apple trees against the stars. The little trickle of water in the stream bed gurgled among its stones, and the very sound of it was freezing.

He shivered and said, “Well, let’s get started.”

They began to walk, staying several feet apart and flashing their lights back and forth. They looked in and around and behind the garage. They searched the barbecue pit. They cut up the areas of black shadow under the trees and the shrubs with their flashlights and saw nothing but the frost-burned grass and drifts of late-fallen leaves. They passed back and forth across the open spaces, and finally they came down to the gully with the stream at the bottom of it and walked a long way in either direction.

And there was nothing. No fallen body. No footprint. No smallest sign that anyone named Carolyn had ever passed that way.

They went back to the house.

“Come on,” said Johnny. “Have some coffee and something to eat. Then you can think what you want to do next.”

Ben stood a moment on the step, frowning. “No, thanks a lot. But I—there’re some things I—I want to stay by the phone in case she calls. Somebody might call. Don’t worry, I’ll make some coffee. Thanks, Johnny. Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it. Maybe I’ll check back after a while.”

“Yes. All right.”

Johnny got into his car and drove away, looking worried. Ben went into the house and on into the bedroom.

There were twin beds, not because they disliked intimacy but because they were both active sleepers. It was not a fluffy room. Carolyn was not a fluffy person, and her household decor included a minimum of ruffles.

The beds had been made, the room straightened up. He looked into the closet, trying to make his mind focus on her clothes. He could not see that anything was missing. She had been wearing tan frontier pants and a sweater under her coat when she drove him into town. The coat was there. He could not see the slacks and the sweater. Presumably, then, she was still wearing them.

Where would she go in slacks and sweater, without a coat, on a cold November day?

He began to look through her bureau. Her red leather wallet and her key ring were in the top drawer. He shut the drawer again and went back into the hall to the telephone. He felt very old and very tired, hollow inside. His hands shook. He leafed through the phone book until he found the number he wanted. Then he dialed it and waited.

A woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

Ben said, “Hello, Ivy, is Ernie there? This is Ben Forbes.”

“Why, yes, he is—what’s the matter, Ben? Your voice sounds so funny.”

“Please, Ivy. Let me talk to him.”

He heard her calling, “—for you, Ernie. It’s Ben and he sounds like something’s wrong.”

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, Ernie?”

“Yeah. What is it, Ben?”

His voice sounded strange even in his own ears. “It’s Carolyn,” he said. “My wife. I don’t know what’s happened to her and I want you to tell me what I ought to do.”