Higgins, with whose words, felt the full impact of his chief’s fear. He walked around the building and got in his car and started toward the hospital again. He could tell Bogan that a man under great strain often mistranslates what he sees and hears, and Duff Bogan had certainly been under strain.
Thinking about it alone in bed, after Higgins had gone, Duff agreed that Higgins might be right. After all, they had watched the house. They had acted, when he’d assumed they were ignoring his story. It could have been a lily box, bright insect eggs, a falling branch. Or could it? In his mind’s eye, going over and over the scene, he could see the slots in the screw heads. Insect eggs didn’t have slots. He could tell them that. But they wouldn’t believe it. He could hardly believe it himself. Maybe it wasn’t true. The FBI didn’t believe it, and the FBI wasn’t dumb, so why should he?
With the last shreds of consciousness — of consciousness free of head-splitting pain — Duff answered himself: It was real and awful and growing worse because nobody would do anything about it. So he would have to do what he could, as soon as he was able to leave the hospital. He’d have to work alone.
It was only afterward, long afterward, that Duff could collate and define the moods and incidents that followed. At the time they seemed unrelated and inexplicable.
His head mended rapidly. The doctors were pleased. Duff explained to them with simulated hauteur that physicists had tough brains. He missed Thanksgiving at the Yates home, but not the meal, as Eleanor borrowed from a restaurant a portable foodwarmer and brought turkey with trimmings to the hospital. Three days later he was released, bandaged, but whole again.
Immediately upon his return he noticed a difference in the temper of the household.
Mrs. Yates seemed nervous and worried. The two younger children were cross and strained.
And Harry Ellings had been suffering from what he described as “attacks”; he stayed away from work twice. Eleanor showed the change most sharply if more subtly.
She was, if anything, lovelier than ever and seemed more aware of her attractiveness.
Miami’s best beauty parlors had vied for a chance to give her wavy, tawny hair its prettiest cut; they had taught her new uses of make-up. Stores in Miami and Miami Beach had supplied her, for the first time in her life, with a luxurious wardrobe. These gifts were, of course, donated for publicity — the traditional due of a Bowl Queen.