An Eye for an Eye (3 page)

The blow had come so fast that Carolyn had not had time to be frightened. Afterward she had not been conscious of anything until now. And the first sensation that returned to her was not fear but a dim awareness of pain and physical discomfort. She tried to move, to turn over and stretch out. But she was in a narrow place, too narrow, and her arms and legs were caught.

A narrow place.

Where?

I must have fallen, she thought. Hit my head. It hurts. Oh, Ben, Ben, what have I done to myself? Ben, come help me.

There was something over her mouth. There was a smell, one she knew, and yet it wasn’t familiar either.

Where was she?

A picture of the kitchen came to her. Herself moving around in it. Getting lunch. Eating it. Washing the dishes, tidying up. Then what?

The floor. She had swept the floor. She saw the pattern of the linoleum very clearly with the bristles of the broom going over it. They were shiny red bristles, some new kind of plastic. She had finished sweeping and hung the broom and dustpan away and then that car had driven in and she had thought, Another one of those peddlers. She had seen him take baskets out of the back of the car and she had thought, If he has good apples I’ll take some. And she had opened the door, but they were potatoes he had in the baskets and—

And—

No, that’s crazy. I’m just dreaming that, making it up. I went back into the house and slipped and fell—

But I didn’t. I didn’t, I didn’t, I—

She made a noise. It would have been quite a loud cry but the tape muffled it and made it no more than a whimper. And now she was fully conscious.

And now she was afraid.

She was down on the floor in the back seat of a car and the smell she smelled was dust and matting and grease and oily metal, a car smell, but not her car. The car was not moving. It was parked somewhere—inside, she thought—and she seemed to be alone in it. There was a blanket over her, not quite covering her face. It was musty and thin. She was terribly cold. Her face and head throbbed. She wondered if her jaw was broken. She started to cry, but she was too afraid for that, too deeply in trouble. The tears froze in her before they got fairly started.

She tried again to move, to get up and see where she was and whether there was any hope of getting away. But her hands had been tied some way to her ankles behind her so that she was perfectly helpless. The tape on her mouth shut off a good deal of breath. She was exhausted in a very few minutes and the pain in her face was making her sick. She lay still. Perhaps for a little while she fainted. She murmured Ben’s name over and over, and she thought, He’ll be so frightened, I’ve got to get away—

It was very strange to be where she was and not to know why.

She tried to remember the man. But she had not paid much attention to him. He was just a man. Tall, coarse-looking, blondish. A type, but she hadn’t noticed any details. She was sure she had never seen him before. Why would he do such a thing? Was he crazy, a maniac?

Rape.

Was that what he wanted? Had he already done it, while she was unconscious?

In a panic of apprehension and disgust she took stock of her person as well as she could. She was all right. Her clothing wasn’t even disarranged. He hadn’t touched her, except to tie her up.

Was he saving her for later when she would be wide awake, knowing fully what went on?

Oh God, let me get out of here. Please let me get out.

Through the window of the car she could, by twisting her head around, see the upper part of a plank wall. The car was in some land of a shed, probably an old garage. Light came in through the cracks. It was still daytime, then. She thought if she could only make a noise someone might hear her and come. She tried for a while to work the tape off her mouth by rubbing her head against the floor, but it was no use. She tried shouting anyway, but that was no use either. She tried again to get her legs and arms apart. She tried until the effort became a madness, a fury, a blind hysterical striving that lost all meaning and then subsided to a feeble twitching and finally to quiescence.

Al Guthrie came and looked at her during this period but she didn’t know it. He made sure his tapes and cords were holding and went away again.

When Carolyn looked for the second time at the cracks of the plank wall the light had dimmed and she knew that it was late in the afternoon. About now she would be driving into town to get Ben. He would wait for her, and wait—

Poor Ben.

She did not fight her bonds again. She understood that she was not going to get free of this particular trap until the man who had put her here came and took her out, for whatever reason he might have.

She waited, lying small, lying still, like a newly caught animal, trying not to think. Not about herself and what might be going to happen to her. Not about Ben, dear beloved Ben who would be out of his mind with worry. Not about anything. Just waiting.

The light got fainter and fainter and disappeared. It was very quiet. She thought there were sounds of cars and voices and doors slamming, infrequent and far away, but enough so that she believed she was not in the country. Occasionally, much farther off, she could hear train whistles. One thing she was sure of. They could not have come very far from Woodley.

She lay in the pitch-dark and waited. Calm. Quite calm. I ought to be screaming and raving with fright, she thought. Why am I lying here like this so quietly? Am I so strong and brave as all that?

I don’t think so. I think I’m just dazed.

What kind of a person am I, anyway?

I guess I’m going to find out.

But I don’t want to. I don’t want to!

Somebody opened a door.

Carolyn stiffened. Her heart seemed to shrink down in her as though it were hiding. She thought for a minute it had stopped.

There was a sound of fumbling and thumping, not loud. Then footsteps crunched on loose slag beside the car. The car door opened. A flashlight beam shone in her face.

“So you’re awake, huh?”

She could not see anything of him beyond the light. But she could smell the raw whiskey on him.

He jerked the blanket from her and threw it aside.

“Okay,” he said. “Now you listen to me and listen good. I’m going to cut your feet loose and take you in the house, and I don’t want any trouble about it, understand?”

His voice was heavy and deep, with a mean note in it. She moved her head and he seemed to take that for assent. The light went away from her face. She heard a knife click open and there was a sensation of tugging, but her arms and legs were numb and she couldn’t be sure.

Something gave. He moved her roughly, straightening her legs so that her feet stuck out the door, and she made a strangled howling under the tape. Water came into her eyes. But she could see him now, a dim hulking shape behind the light, sawing at the tape bands around her ankles.

He put the knife away. “Come on. Get up.”

She tried. He reached in and got her under one arm and pulled. He was strong. She came out of the car like a rag doll and fell onto the slag at his feet.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Quit the clowning and get up.”

She shook her head, trying to tell him that her legs were too stiff and dead to work, but all she could do was grunt. He swore and clicked the flashlight off, shoving it in his pocket. It was pitch-dark again. Carolyn felt herself lifted and half shoved, half carried ahead of him through an open door and into a dark yard. The night air was cold but clean. She saw a house some distance away with one lighted window. She filled her lungs to try to call out in spite of the tape, but he must have been expecting her to do that because he gave her a wicked shake and said in her ear:

“Shut up or I’ll break your goddamn neck.”

He took her fast across the yard. She stumbled up two or three shallow steps onto a porch, and then he pushed her through a door already standing open into a dark room that she knew from the stale old smells of cooking must be a kitchen.

“Stand still,” he told her. “Right here.”

He took his hands away. She heard the door close and heard him turn the lock. He was breathing hard and fast and he stank of whiskey. But somehow she knew he was not drunk in any sense that would help her.

He found the light switch and turned it on.

And he was standing there looking at her, his shoulders hunched a little, his big hands hanging at his sides, his head stretched forward toward her. There was a red flush across his cheekbones and on his forehead. His eyes were like an animal’s eyes, a hunting animal, bright with excitement.

“Well,” he said, “I did it. I sure as hell did it, didn’t I?”

He seemed to expect her to admire him. He came closer to her and held out one hand with the palm up and laughed.

“See that? That’s where I got ’em now, right there where I want ’em.”

He closed the fingers in a gesture of crushing.

She shook her head. Her knees went out from under her and he caught her and put her on a rickety chair. He took the knife out of his pocket again.

“I’ll let you loose because I guess I got to,” he said, “but I’m warning you. Those window shades are down and they stay down, see? Minute I catch you near one I’ll belt you. Minute you open your mouth to yell I’ll belt you. You never been belted much, I guess, huh? One of these spoiled dames that thinks everything is made just for her. Well, I’ll teach you. The doors are locked and the keys are in my pocket and you ain’t going to get out. You understand that? Okay.”

He cut the tape from her wrists. Then he took hold of one corner of the wide strip on her face and pulled.

She nearly fainted again. She felt him open her mouth and pour some liquor into it. She jerked away, coughing, and he shrugged and tilted the bottle to his own mouth. When she could talk again she looked up at him with utter hatred and said:

“Why have you done this to me? What right have you got—”

“Right!” he said. “I’ll damn well tell you what right I’ve got.” He slammed the bottle down and leaned over her. He radiated a kind of ferocity that was like nothing she had ever seen before, mixed with and part of a devout indignation.

“Your husband,” he said to her, “took my wife away from me. So now I’ve taken his away from him. That’s fair enough, ain’t it? I don’t see how anything could be fairer.”

She sat perfectly still for a minute, staring at him. Then she said slowly, one word at a time:

“My husband took your wife away?”

She began to laugh.

His face become redder and uglier. “Think that’s funny, huh?”

“Not my husband. Not Ben. Somebody else. You’ve made a mistake.”

“The hell it was somebody else. You’re Mrs. Ben Forbes, aren’t you?”

“Yes I am. And he never touched your wife.” She was not laughing now, she was screaming harshly in a totally strange voice. “He’s not that kind. He’s never looked at another woman. He’s—” She searched for a word and found it and flung it at him as a summation of everything he was not. “He’s decent.”

He shook his head. “Not that way. If it had been it would have been easy. I’d have killed him, and her too. Like that. But no, not that son of a bitch. He did it legal.”

Carolyn said stupidly, “I don’t understand.”

“What are you, dumb or something? You’re a lawyer’s wife and you don’t know about divorce?”

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “Just wait.” She was shivering now. She was already cold, but cold was only a small part of it. She folded her arms across her and put her hands under her elbows and pressed her knees hard together. But the chair creaked with her shivering even so.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “Your wife divorced you. My husband was her lawyer. Is that right?”

“You bet it is. I’m Al Guthrie, didn’t you ever hear that name? And hers is Lorene. And your husband, he swanked around that stinking courtroom and got Lorene to tell the judge a lot of stuff about me and the old fool gave her a divorce. Said she didn’t have to live with me any more.”

“And you blame Ben? You blame the lawyer because your wife wanted a divorce?”

Her voice broke on a note of unbelief, and he gave her a hot blind look and said:

“You’re goddamn right I blame him.”

Carolyn said, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“You think so,” Al said. “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think. Lorene fought with me before. She left me before, a couple or three times. But she always came back. She was mine, see? Just give her a little while to cool down and she knew who she belonged to. She’d come running back. Every time, see? It was just between us. But this last time your husband got hold of her and filled her up on a lot of crap about her rights and what she could do and what she didn’t have to stand for. Mr. Forbes says, Mr. Forbes says!”

He made a vicious slashing motion with his hand. He was moving around now in the filthy cluttered room, unable to contain his rage any longer standing still.

“I figured she’d get over it. I figured, Let her get her stinking little divorce, what the hell—she’ll come back. She can come back any time before it’s final and spend the night with me and there won’t be any divorce. So I let her sit for a while. Let her get good and lonesome, see? While I had me a time and she couldn’t complain about it. Then I went around to see if she was ready yet. You know what she did?”

Carolyn said, “No.”

“She threw me out.” He spoke slowly now, his eyes narrowed remembering. “She told me if I bothered her she’d call the cops. Real snotty. That’s what your husband taught her, how to be snotty and threaten me with the cops.”

He looked at Carolyn, shivering on the chair.

“A man’s wife belongs to him. Nobody’s got a right to come in between them. I told her that. I told her I was tired fooling around and if she didn’t come back to me I’d make her. And she told me—”

Carolyn stared at his mouth, fascinated. She had never seen such a mouth. She watched the lips move, watched the muscles stir in the cheeks and along the jaw, watched the broad white edges of his teeth. It was almost splendid in its brutality, like the heavy jowls of a lion.

He said, “She got a goddamned injunction against me. Forbes put her up to that, too. Hadn’t been for him I could have handled her. I’d have her back with me right now.”

Carolyn drew a long breath, trying to make her voice sound calm and reasonable.

“Ben is a lawyer. He does what the law says he should do. There’s nothing personal—”

“Law,” said Al contemptuously. “Any cheap shyster can do tricks with it. I got the right on my side. That’s more important.”

“You haven’t anything on your side,” Carolyn said shrilly. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve kidnaped me. Don’t you know that’s a capital offense just the same as murder?”

She enlarged on that, with sudden hope.

“If you let me go now I’ll promise not to tell who you are or anything about you. But if you don’t the FBI will be after you tomorrow and you won’t have a chance.”

He laughed at her.

“FBI, hell. Just because I never went to a fancy law college don’t mean I’m dumb, you know. I didn’t leave a bunch of printed signs around. How’s the FBI going to look for me when they don’t even know what happened to you?”

“They’ll know.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but they will. They will!” She jumped up, her voice rising again to that harsh strange scream. “Anyway, what do you want with me? What do you think I can do about it?”

“It’s real plain and simple,” Al said. “I’d think even a dame could figure it out. Your husband talked my wife into leaving me. I want her back. So I just hold onto you until your husband gets her to change her mind.”

The enormity of the idea, the insane logic of it were stunning. She hardly knew how to argue it.

“Don’t you see how impossible it is? No matter what you do to us Ben can’t make your wife come back to you if she doesn’t want to. Nobody can.”

“Well then,” Al said slowly, “that’s going to be tough on all of us.”

“What do you mean?” asked Carolyn, looking at his face and thinking, This is a crazy man, God help me, there’s no reasoning intelligence there, nothing to call to. Crazy, and something more, something even worse. He’s a fool.

“Because,” said Al, “if I don’t get Lorene back he ain’t going to get you back either.”

“No,” Carolyn whispered. “Oh no. You couldn’t do that. It’s so—pointless.” She had to sit down again, and the room became unsteady around her. From a great distance she heard his voice, rough with an old fury, a rage long nursed and brooded over.

“—for an eye, ain’t that what it says? His wife for mine. He didn’t give a damn for me, none of ’em did, when they sat around on their fat cans in that courtroom taking Lorene away from me. They didn’t care how I lived without her. Okay. Okay.”

He was drinking again. The liquor glistened on his lips, turning them moist and pink as a girl’s. He wiped them with his hand and said:

“I’ll kill Lorene, too. She was a virgin when I got her and I broke her myself, and I ain’t going to leave her for any other man to take. After that, I don’t know. Maybe Forbes, too. I’ll see how I feel then.”

Carolyn shook her head. It was quite difficult to speak. “You can’t do it,” she said. “The police—”

“Maybe they’ll get me. Maybe not. So what? I got nothing much to live for. You take away everything a man has and he just don’t care, see?”

He brooded, smiling a little. He’s enjoying himself, Carolyn thought. He’s wallowing in the sense of power, thinking how he can hurt and frighten people, loving every minute of it.

Is this how a killer looks?

She turned her eyes away.

There was something, some detail in his plan that did not fit. Something left out. It had a vague connotation of hope in her mind. She pursued it desperately through the mists of fear.

“Ben,” she said. “You’ll have to tell him.”

“Oh, sure. Sure. I’ll make it real plain to him.”

That was where the hope was. He had to tell Ben what had happened to her so that he could make Ben talk to Lorene, and the minute Ben knew he would tell the police and the FBI and they would come and take her away.

She kept her eyes averted so he would not see the look in them. “When are you going to tell him?”

“When I get ready.”

“But the sooner you—”

“Let him sweat,” Al said. “He let me sweat plenty. All these months with Lorene away from me, getting me arrested if I even tried to talk to her, not knowing what she’s doing or who she’s with,
he
didn’t care. He had you. He wasn’t eating his meals around in joints or looking for a friendly bed to get into. He wasn’t losing his job or getting kicked out of his own home. The hell with him. Let him sweat.”

He smiled again and added, “Then when I do call him I figure he’ll be kind of softened up, not quite so damned sure of himself. I figure he’ll be ready to hump.”

“But—” said Carolyn, and stopped, and tried again. “But it may take time, a lot of time. You’d better tell him right away so he can start talking to your wife.”

“I got time. It’s a couple weeks yet before the divorce is final.” He looked down at her. “I know what’s on your mind, but I told you I ain’t dumb. Forbes won’t call in any help. I’ll make that plain to him too. This is between him and me, and he better keep it that way—unless he’s real anxious to get rid of you.”

He drank again and lighted a cigarette and tossed the match in the sink. There was a silence. Carolyn sat with her eyes shut and her arms hugged tight around her body. After a while in a curiously flat voice she said:

“Please, let me go to the bathroom.”

He seemed to enjoy that, as though it were an admission of her helplessness. He became almost jovial.

“Why, sure,” he said. “Right this way.”

He opened a door in a corner of the kitchen, turned on a light, and pointed down.

Carolyn got up and walked stiffly across the room.

“In the cellar?”

“Sure, in the cellar. That’s good enough for the working stiffs.”

She went down the narrow steps, hanging to the pipe rail. Rough stone walls had been whitewashed once and were still pale under a coating of grime. The windows were boarded up. There was a rust-stained sink, and toward the front of the cellar an old gravity-feed furnace. Beyond that was the coalbin, with a little heap of coal left in it and a shovel against the wall. Beside the coalbin was a little booth built out of tongue-and-groove stuff and painted a dark gray. Al, who had come down the steps behind her, pointed to it.

“It ain’t fancy but it works. Help yourself.”

She walked the length of the cellar. Warmth came from the furnace as she passed it. She went into the booth and closed the door.

She leaned her forehead against the cold wood and thought, What shall I do? Oh, God, what shall I do? She wanted to cry, but there did not seem to be any tears in her. She felt strange, not real at all in anything she said or did.

Her hands were quite steady. She marveled at them.

After a few minutes she came out of the booth and walked to the furnace and stood close to it.

“Come on,” Al said. “Let’s not spend the night down here.”

“I’m cold. I want to get warm.”

“Look. I told you, come on.”

She did not move.

He came toward her, striding down the length of the cellar.

She reached out and picked up the stubby broad-bladed coal shovel and held it in both hands as high as the ceiling would let her, and she rushed at Al Guthrie, making a sound like a thin whining between her clenched jaws.

She saw his face in the naked light. It swelled out and up, becoming huge, red-flushed, reamed with two bright holes of angry blue. She saw the wavy hair, prinked and primped and beautiful, and she felt the weight of the shovel in her hands, and there was a desire in her, a lust that would have horrified her if she had been sane. But she was not.

She was a strong young woman. She swung the shovel down.

He dodged it easily and took it away from her and threw it clanging into a corner with one hand while he held her with the other. And she screamed, but not for very long. He beat her. That was all he did to her but he did it savagely, and to a woman who had never in her life been subjected to physical violence it was enough.

That was Tuesday night.

She spent most of Wednesday lying on a frowsy bed in the smaller of the two upstairs rooms. It had only one window and that was closed and had a heavy quilt hung over it to deaden any sound she might make. It was quite dark in the room and there was a cold unlived-in-smell. Her wrists and ankles were tied with long cords to the four corners of the old iron bedstead. She could not move around much, but she had no desire to move. She had no desire to do anything, not even to live.

In the afternoon Al Guthrie came in and turned on the ceiling light. He leaned over and looked at her.

“Want me to bring you the shovel?” he asked. “Want to try that again?”

She did not answer, and he laughed. He gagged her and made sure the cords were tight. Then he turned off the light and went out. She could hear him go down the stairs and through the house and out the door. After that it was still. She heard the chuffing of a light engine, unexpected and startlingly close. It roused her for a moment, but then the sound receded and she lapsed back into the gray daze of negation. When she was awake she felt and remembered. It was better this way.

Some time later Al came into the room again. He turned on the light and untied her. He smelled of beer and he was pleased about something. He threw a newspaper on the bed.

“There,” he said. “Look at that.”

She lay limp and unmoving.

“Oh for Chrissake,” he said impatiently, “you’re not dead. Sit up.”

He pulled her up and shoved the paper in front of her. She stared at it, not seeing it. Then a picture caught her eye. It was familiar. It was herself. They’re looking for me, she thought. They’re going to find me. With sudden avidity she seized the paper and read.

“What did I tell you?” Al said. “They got no idea at all.” He repeated, “No idea,” several times, full of pride in his accomplishment.

Carolyn let the paper fall. She began to cry, a slow dribbling of tears without any sound.

Al laughed. “Haven’t you got any faith in your husband? He’s a real smart man, remember? He’ll find a way. Or don’t you figure he wants you back bad enough to bother trying?”