An Eye for an Eye Read Free

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