Free An Eye for an Eye by Leigh Brackett

“Real hard day, huh?”
    “Yeah.” He put his arm around her. She was one of these cute round-eyed cheerful girls, and Ernie always marveled that she could stay cheerful year after year with all she had to put up with, including two kids.
    “I stopped by Ben’s house,” he said. “I couldn’t get him to come.”
    “Poor Ben. I should think he’d be about crazy.”
    “Yeah.”
    “There’s still no sign of her?”
    “No.”
    “Poor Carolyn. You wonder what on earth could have happened to her. It’s so strange.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Just vanishing like that. As though the ground had swallowed her.”
    Ernie sprang up. “Now why the hell would you want to say a thing like that?”
    “It’s just a saying.” She stared at him, hurt. “I know you’re tired, but I don’t see it’s any reason to snap at me.”
    “I’m sorry. Let’s drop it, huh? How about another beer?”
    They watched the eleven-o’clock news, and then Ernie began to twirl the dial. He got scraps of old movies on three other channels and he and Ivy played their customary game of identifying the movies almost at the first flick of the switch. Some of them had been showing on the local stations for four or five years. Finally he asked Ivy if she had had enough and she said she had. He turned off the set, turned down the furnace, and checked the doors. Ivy saw that all was well in the kids’ room. They went to bed.
    Ivy snuggled in his arms and was asleep in two minutes. Ernie should have been. He was dog-tired. But he kept thinking of things.
    As though the ground had swallowed her.
    Just an old saying. But he wished Ivy hadn’t used it.
    Counting Tuesday, Carolyn had now been missing for four days without a trace. She had taken nothing with her. There had been no sign of violence. If she had wandered away from the house on foot, someone almost certainly would have seen her.
    It looked as though she had gone off with someone she knew and trusted, expecting that she would be coming right back.
    Only she never had.

 
ten
     
    On Saturday morning Ben Forbes called Mary Catherine Brewer at Blackstone’s, the department store where she and Lorene worked, before he left the house. If he called from his office Grace Vitelli would inevitably know it and he did not want her to.
    Miss Brewer had a slightly hard, matter-of-fact voice that he liked.
    “Lorene asked me about that,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I tucked that number away somewhere. She said she didn’t want it, but I hated to take the responsibility of destroying it. You know how it is. I didn’t have any time this morning, but I’ll take a look tonight. Could I call you—”
    “Miss Brewer, how about your lunch hour?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’ll run you out and bring you back again. I’ll even buy you the best lunch in town. It wouldn’t take you very long to find the number, would it?”
    “I don’t suppose so. But—”
    “Look, I know you have a job to worry about. I promise to get you back on time. It’s very important to me.”
    “It must be,” she said, and then rather reluctantly she added, “Okay. I get off at twelve-thirty.”
    “Where shall I pick you up?”
    “The employees’ entrance on the back street. They’re particular about that.”
    He said he would be there. Then he drove into town. He was late getting to the office. Grace Vitelli greeted him with the gentle concern she had developed since Tuesday night. She asked if he had heard anything and he said that he had not. She shook her head and went immediately into a recital of the business calls that had come in.
    He cut her short. “Let’s stop kidding ourselves, Grace. I’m not worth a damn and it isn’t fair to my clients. I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to be doing.”
    She looked at him, her face strained with pity, but she could not deny the truth of what he said.
    “I’m going to close the office until—this is over. Postpone what we can, give the rest around to