“For being tired, the extra cocktail is recommended.”
“Probably go straight to my head.”
“The very effect I had in mind.”
Duff laughed. “Why, Indigo? How come?”
Her lucent, dark eyes flashed briefly. “Why? Who can say why? I saw you on the campus one day. And again at a football game one night. I asked people who you were.
Why?” She shrugged as she turned the car. “When you get a certain kind of feeling you shouldn’t ask why.”
They dined and sat afterward in a moonlit patio on the edge of the sea. At midnight they drove back to her house and kissed good night. Duff, for a reason he couldn’t quite name, refused to go in to have a nightcap, and went home by bus because his refusal angered her. They quarreled on the doorstep, and she went in, finally, slamming the door in his face.
During that space of time the capsule left in a drugstore made a journey to the FBI in Miami and thence to a laboratory. About two o’clock in the morning, when Duff was in bed, but unable to sleep, owing to alternate waves of self-approval and self-castigation over his rather alarmed flight from Miss Indigo Stacey, Higgins, who was sound asleep at home, reached from his bed to snatch up a ringing phone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Ed Waite, at the lab. Sorry to wake you.”