Duff said wretchedly, “I shouldn’t have phoned.”
“Oh, sure. That warehouse hunch is solid. And my alarm will let go in less than an hour, anyhow.”
Nevertheless, Duff felt disappointed; he felt as he had ever since the beginning, foolish. The FBI and the police knew. They could and did think and act. And he chimed in afterward with his half-baked hunches. Bitterly, he started toward the porch, but he heard Mrs. Yates crying softly, and he went in to try to comfort her.
Cars surrounded the Yates home, parked in the drive and on the lawns — police cars, press and radio cars, Orange Bowl officials’ cars and the cars of friends, neighbors, curious strangers. They had accumulated all day.
Mrs. Yates and Duff were obliged to keep telling people that they had no idea where Eleanor might have gone, with whom or whether she could have been kidnaped. Because of the numbers “of people, the shock and the confusion, they had sent Marian and Charles to stay with friends.
Some time after lunch Duff observed that Mrs. Yates was not strong enough to bear both her anxiety and the thronging people. He arranged with the police to get her moved to the home of the friend who had already taken in the youngsters. The police saw to it that neither the reporters nor the merely curious followed the Yates station wagon, and when Duff returned to the house, the crowd was thinning.
Toward late afternoon he was alone. As far as he knew, not even the police or the FBI were keeping watch. The Yates place had served its final purpose where Ellings’ colleagues were concerned. And if Eleanor should happen to come back home somehow, he was there.
He believed she was dead. So, he was sure, did the FBI. But Duff knew he would not give up hope until it was certain.
He went upstairs and lay down exhaustedly. By and by he realized it was the afternoon of Harry’s funeral. They had all forgotten. No matter. He slept because a time comes when no one, whatever his anxiety, can stay awake longer. When he woke up, the sun was setting. He realized he had been dreaming about the events of the past weeks and remembered vaguely a jumble of faces, including the face of Indigo Stacey. He lay thinking about her, and it occurred to him that she represented another of the anomalies he’d sought the night before. Scotty had once said that Indigo had wanted to meet Duff even before their first date. Duff wondered why, as he had wondered at other times. He wasn’t the type for whom glamour girls fell on sight. Still, Indigo wasn’t an ordinary glamour girl. A White Russian — or at least her parents were that.
He thought now about their history. Had Indigo’s father and her father’s brother necessarily been loyal to the Czar? Necessarily fled the Bolshevik revolution? Was it possible that a conspiracy against America could have been forming back in the days of Lenin and Trotsky? Could Indigo Stacey have had a special reason, related to everything else, for wanting to meet him? Had her “large passion” been an unsuccessful attempt to find out what he knew? Who — and where— was her uncle? Apparently, according to Mrs. Yates, her now-deceased father and her uncle had become successful businessmen.