Eleanor said, “Was it close enough to — to hurt us?”
He stared at her, then smiled, and found a lump coming in his throat. “Lord,” he murmured, “why didn’t you ask that before? No. Too far away. The radiation here couldn’t have amounted to anything.”
The girl smiled back. “Glad I had a physicist along to tell me.”
The first half of the Orange Bowl game ended in the usual pandemonium. Teams trotted from the field and were replaced by bands in red uniforms, in blue, in green, in gold and in the white of the University of Miami. Thousands of colored balloons rose in the sky.
The combined bands began to play. Floats moved sedately from the corners of the stadium and paraded around the field. One of these — an immense replica of an orange — proceeded to the center of the field and opened magically. The Orange Bowl Queen stood inside it, and girls on the floats, pretty girls in bathing suits, began to throw real oranges to the crowd. The governors of three states marched forward with what the program called “a retinue of beauty” to crown the queen.
Standing in her robes, smiling, waving, Eleanor felt happy. She was very tired, but everything would soon be over.
In the Yates box, Duff grinned at the yelling of Marian and the shrill whistling of Charles. He handed a pair of borrowed field glasses to Mrs. Yates, who faced her wheel chair to see every detail of the coronation.
Duff gazed at Eleanor, standing straight and lovely, as he mused on the recent, dramatic past. They had been discovered on the island by a Coast Guard plane which flew in to investigate. A second plane had taken them back to Miami, where they had landed secretly. Eleanor had given out the story that she had suffered a “loss of memory” due to “exhaustion and an accidental fall” and spent two nights with “a friend in Fort Lauderdale.”
Nothing about kidnaping, about enemy agents, about a mushroom cloud rising where a boat had vanished. That would not become public, Duff reflected, until it was all over.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see the grinning face of Scotty Smythe.