Beloved Enemy, The (House of Winslow Book #30)

by Gilbert, Morris

“I hate to see it.”

  “So do I. I was hoping she’d be over it, but it seems to be getting worse.”

  Phineas bounced a pencil point on the tip of his index finger, then laid the pencil down on the desk. “We’re going to have to move to another site, but so help me, I don’t have another idea in my mind. I’ve had this tell in my heart so long that I haven’t had time to think of anything else.”

  “Well, we’ll find something, I’m sure. You haven’t given up hope, have you?”

  “No, but I’m just a little disconcerted. To be interrupted like that right at the moment of triumph—that makes it worse.” He grinned suddenly, and his eyes twinkled. “I’ve had to struggle a bit with my anger. Last night, after I was in bed, I thought of ways to punish Amir. Then I realized that that wouldn’t do.”

  “We all have a little bitterness and anger. We don’t like people taking things that belong to us.”

  “I suppose that’s human nature.”

  “It really is. You know, there’s a verse in the Bible that says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention.’ Can’t remember where it is,” Josh muttered. “Somewhere in the book of Ecclesiastes, I think, or Proverbs. But in any case, it’s true enough. We’re selfish to the bone, and when somebody interferes with us, we strike back.”

  “You know, I read a study on that two years ago. This social scientist of some sort—a psychologist, I believe—would call people in for an interview, and there would be things on the table—coffee cups, ashtrays, boxes of paper clips. All sorts of things. This psychologist would begin interviewing the person, and then he would slowly move one of the items a little closer to the fellow. He kept moving things closer, and the more items he moved, the more nervous the subjects got.” Phineas laughed aloud. “Finally they became unable to concentrate, and the psychologist said they were angry because that was their space and somebody was taking it.”

  “I guess it’s the Adam in us, but I’m working on it.”

  “So am I … so am I,” the professor said. “We’ll find something. Don’t worry, my boy.”

  ****

  A few hours after this conversation, Josh looked up to see a car approaching. They had moved away from the site and had set up their tents near one of the few wells in the country. “Who’s that, I wonder?” Kefira asked. She had come up to stand beside Josh, and her eyes glinted. “Probably somebody to run us off of this place.”

  But the intent of this visitor was quite different. The car stopped, and a man got out. He was dressed in a white suit of English cut and wore a sun helmet. The professor came out and said, “Why, that’s Charles Oaken. I was on a dig with him three years ago.” He greeted the visitor with a hearty, “Hello, Charles!”

  “Hello, Phineas.” Oaken was a tall, limber individual of some forty years. He had light skin that was badly sunburned, and his blue eyes sparkled. “I hear you got thrown out of your dig.”

  “My fault, I’m afraid, Charles. I didn’t see to the proper paper work.”

  “No,” Oaken said and laughed. “I heard he diddled you out of the lost tomb of Mensah.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so blasted happy about it, Charles,” Phineas grumbled.

  “Stepped on your sore toe.” Charles turned and said, “I don’t believe I’ve met these young people.” He took the introductions, nodded, and then said, “I suppose all of you are thinking of ways to strip Amir to the bone after what he did.”

  “Well, I am!” Kefira huffed. She did not like the visitor being so cheerful in the face of their plight, and her demeanor was stern.

  “Don’t shoot, Miss Reis,” Oaken said. “I have some news that may make you feel a little better.”

  “What kind of news, Charles?” Phineas asked quickly.

  “It’s about your dig and the lost tomb of Mensah. Amir had the photographers all there ready to become a celebrity the world over. He opened the door, and guess what was there on the other side?”

  “I suppose a perfectly preserved mummy and lots of gold and jewels,” Josh said.

  “Not at all, young man! The fact is the door was fastened onto a solid face of rock.”

  A moment’s silence fell over the three, and then Phineas began to laugh. “That old trick! Well, I’m glad now that I didn’t have to face the music.”

  “What does this mean, Professor?” Kefira interrupted the two men, who were now laughing.

  “Oh, it was an old trick of some of the pharaohs, Kefira,” Phineas explained. “It was hard work keeping their tombs concealed, and some of them would make up false tombs. They would simply put a wall and a door over a sheet of solid rock, and the grave robbers, after going to all the trouble of getting through, would find nothing but rock.”

  Kefira stared at him and then smiled. “So Amir didn’t get anything!”

  “He got plenty of laughs from the newspapermen who had come from a long way. Some of them are pretty sore. I don’t think he’ll want to be showing his face again soon.”

  The visitor stayed for a while, then took his leave, and Josh could not resist saying to Kefira, “Well, you see how much good all your anger did? Amir didn’t get a thing out of it.”

  Kefira reddened. “I suppose you’re right, but he didn’t mean for it to happen that way.” She shook her hair, and it cascaded down her back, a black waterfall glistening in the sun. “I suppose you think I’m a terrible person with a horrible temper.”

  “No, Kefira, I think you’re a sweet, generous, wonderful woman who let her temper get away with her.”

  Kefira laughed. “Good, and you’re to minimize all my faults and find all the nice things you can to say about me.”

  ****

  At supper that night Diana had been strangely quiet. Finally she looked at Phineas and said, “There’s nothing going on here, is there, Uncle?”

  “Not really, Diana. We’ll try to find another spot, but it’ll take a while.”

  “I think I’ll go back to New York.”

  Kefira looked up swiftly and saw that Diana’s face was fixed, but then suddenly the woman turned to her and smiled. “I think you can take care of these men without me, can’t you, Kefira?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “But are you sure you want to do this, Diana?” Phineas asked, a worried look on his face. “I’d been counting on you.”

  “If you develop anything big, maybe I’ll come back. But the way these things are, you could go for a year or two without anything that would require me. No, I think I’ll go on back.”

  After the meal, Diana made it a point to find Josh and have a word with him. “You’re not too surprised, are you, Josh?”

  “About your going back? Well, I am a little.”

  “You know me pretty well, I think. I can never stick to anything.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek. “I thought we could go back and find what we had before, but someone said you can’t step in the same river twice.” She removed her hand and said, “You won’t miss me too much, I don’t think.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find some feminine company.” She tossed her head back and laughed. “I’m not very subtle, but you’re following Kefira around like a moon-faced calf. Why don’t you make love to her?”

  Josh stared at her. “Well, I just don’t—”

  He could not finish, and Diana shook her head. “You’re hopeless, Josh.” She sighed, then turned and strode away.

  ****

  Kefira could not sleep. She woke up two hours before dawn and dressed. It was too early to start cooking, so she read the New Testament for a time but soon grew restless. She stuck the book in her shirt pocket and went out to watch the sun rise. She was not quite oriented to their new location as she had been at the tell. The country was flat, but there were some low hills rising over in the east. They looked very close, and she began walking toward them in the moonlight. The moon was full and shed its silver beams down, and the country was quiet. It was the coolest time of t
he day, and she knew it would soon be blistering hot.

  As she walked, she thought about her life. Her thoughts went back to the prison cell at Sing Sing where her brother was locked up. It always grieved her to think about this, and she forced it out of her mind, trying instead to think of what Chaim would do when he got out. She was disturbed about what had happened at the tell, but she knew somehow she had to make enough money to help her brother make a new start.

  The walking was pleasant, and the sand was firm underfoot, not shifting, as it had been in some spots. She saw what looked like a tent off in the distance, and she grew interested. As she walked toward it, however, she began thinking of the Winslows and the time she had spent in their house. She remembered it all as if it were a dream. There had been such love and happiness there. There had been joy too, and she remembered Kat’s innocent laughter as the two of them had pursued a wayward possum in the woods.

  What would it be like, she thought, to live all the time with people loving each other and having relatives all around? I’d give anything to live like that….

  Her thoughts took her then to Josh, and from there to Diana. She could not help feeling a surge of joy that Diana was leaving. She admitted to herself that she had felt jealous of Diana’s possessiveness and had felt, while she was around, that Josh could never turn loose his thoughts of her. Josh had told her plainly enough that he had felt himself in love with her once, that they had had an affair, but he had also told her clearly that Diana was not for him.

  Kefira had a way of getting lost in her thoughts, of going over things in the past, exploring events, bringing up faces with a startling clarity. She did this until finally she saw that what she had taken for a tent was simply an outcropping of rock. Looking east, she spotted a wadi on one side and followed it for a while out of curiosity, but she did not see much to interest her, except a delightful desert mouse with large ears and a very long tail.

  Finally the sun began to shed milky gray light in the east, signaling the approach of sunrise. I’d better get back, Kefira thought. I’ll be late for breakfast. She turned and started back, still thinking mostly of what she would do with her life if she had to leave and go back to the States, and the thought depressed her. She gave in to it for a time, then finally shook her head. “I can’t be thinking of things like that. I’ll be all right.” She followed her footprints back along the wadi to where she had entered the dry creek bed, then headed west toward the camp.

  Without warning, a strong wind kicked up, spraying sand and dust in her face. She pulled her neck scarf up over her head and over her eyes and kept walking. As the wind became stronger, she could hardly walk against it, and soon she was forced to stop. She tried to look around through the thin cotton neckerchief. The sun had been obscured by the flying sand and now the entire sky was milky. She was no longer certain if she was walking away from or toward the sun.

  In confusion, she did the only thing she could think to do. With nothing to shelter her from the stinging sand, she sat on the ground and prayed aloud. “Please, God, make this wind die down so I can get back to the camp.”

  Within seconds, the wind calmed as quickly as it had begun. Breathing a sigh of relief, Kefira stood and located the sun in the east and began to walk in the opposite direction. She searched for her footprints, but everything had been obliterated in the wind. Quite certain that she was walking in the right general direction, though, she picked up her pace, but fifteen minutes later she stopped and looked around in confusion. The camp was nowhere in sight, and she felt a shiver of fear. “I must be going in the wrong direction. Perhaps it’s over this way.” Turning to her left, she walked steadily, looking ahead at the horizon. The longer she walked, the more frightened she became. She had heard stories of people lost in the desert who had become dehydrated and died for lack of water. Her fear grew as nothing appeared on the horizon, and she stopped and looked around again uncertainly. The land all around was flat. Nothing broke the horizon except the low hills behind her in the east. She breathed another prayer and began walking in a westerly direction.

  The sun rose slowly and an hour later Kefira knew she was utterly lost. The earth was beginning to heat up from the warm rays of the sun, and she was already thirsty. “They’ll come and find me,” she whispered. “All I have to do is keep my head.”

  But somehow keeping her head seemed difficult. She had no watch, but she knew that time was passing by the way the sun had risen high in the sky. She was completely disoriented now and had not the vaguest idea of which way to go. She could have missed the camp completely, and she realized that it might now be in any direction at all. Being in the city had taught her nothing about being lost in a featureless desert, and as the sun beat down on her, Kefira Reis felt terror as she had never known it. She stopped, not knowing what to do. I may be walking away from the camp, she thought. The best thing I can do is stay still and wait for them to come find me.

  She spotted a small sand dune not far away and began to walk toward it. A small wadi behind the dune offered a tiny bit of shade. There was no water, although there had been at one time. Crouching down to shade herself as much as she could from the blistering sun, Kefira knew for the first time in her life what the fear of death really was.

  ****

  “What do you mean she’s not in her tent!” Josh exclaimed. “She has to be!”

  Diana had gone to seek Kefira at Josh’s request. He had gone to the cooking tent, where Lisimba had already started working on breakfast. But he had said, “Missy is not here. Probably still asleep.”

  Diana had wandered in, and Josh had said, “Go see if you can wake Kefira. I think she’s overslept.”

  Diana had returned quickly, saying, “She’s not there. She’s not in the sanitary tent either. I looked there too.”

  An alarm went off in Josh’s head. Warning flowed through him, ringing like a clear bell. “She might be with the professor.”

  He went at once to Dr. Welles’s tent, followed by Diana. But when the professor stepped outside and they asked after Kefira, he looked surprised. “Why, I haven’t seen her since last evening!”

  “She’s not here. We’ve searched everywhere,” Josh said, his voice strained.

  “Do you think she could have been kidnapped?” Diana asked suddenly.

  “That’s not likely,” Josh replied.

  The three stood there uncertainly, and finally Josh said, “She likes to take walks. Let’s spread out and see if we can find her. Just call out her name.”

  Lisimba’s aid was quickly enlisted, and the four of them took off in different directions. Josh moved out two hundred yards calling her name, but only the sound of his own voice echoed back. He looked with despair at the flatness of the land and shook his head. “This is too slow,” he muttered. “We’ll have to use the truck.”

  He hurried back to the camp and found that the others had had no success. “I’ll take the truck and make circles. Diana, you go with me. You can help look.”

  Josh got to the truck, turned the key—and nothing happened.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?” Josh said angrily, pounding his hands on the steering wheel. He tried again and still no response. He got out and threw back the hood. He found nothing wrong and then muttered, “The battery’s dead.”

  “Do we have a spare?” the professor asked worriedly.

  “No, we should have, though, out here by ourselves like this. We’ll have to send someone to the village, but I doubt if they have one.”

  “I’ll go to the village,” the professor offered, “and the rest of you can continue looking. If I can find a battery, I’ll bring it back.”

  Josh knew it was at least an hour’s walk to the village, and they couldn’t just sit and wait for the professor to return. “We’ve got to find her soon,” he said. “She could dehydrate in this sun, and besides, it’s not safe for a woman out there.”

  Josh went at once and filled two bottles with water, tied them together, and slung th
em over his shoulder.

  Diana said, “Josh, don’t you get lost.” Worry was in her voice, and she said, “As soon as my uncle gets back with a battery, we’ll come out and find you.”

  “That’s good, Diana.”

  “She’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

  Josh tried to smile but said, “I pray God she will,” and he started walking.

  Diana watched him until he became nothing but a dot. She saw him turn left and knew he was making a circle, and as she looked around at the land, she saw what an immensity of ground there was to cover. She said to Lisimba, “Well, Lisimba, you’re a praying man. I expect you’d better start.”

  Lisimba nodded, bobbing his head up and down. “I have already started, Miss Diana.”

  ****

  The heat was like the blow of a fist, and Kefira kept her eyes shut against the glare of the sun’s beams. She had resisted the impulse to get up and start running and crying out for help. The temptation had come to her, but she knew there was no hope in that. She opened her eyes into slits and saw that the sun was past the meridian, and she knew it was at least one or two o’clock, the hottest part of the day. Her mouth was dry, and her lips felt parched. Every tissue in her body cried out for moisture. She had followed the professor’s admonition to drink water constantly in small sips, so she had not felt the effects of the sun while on the dig. Besides that, she had taken care to rest in the shade part of each day, but now she had been under the blazing heat of the Egyptian sun for more than eight hours, and she felt light-headed.

  The thought of death came to her more than once, and the fear that was stronger than anything she had ever known was still there. She hated the thought of dying, for there was so much she wanted to do. She thought of leaving Chaim and how he would need her, and she thought of Josh and knew she would never have with him what her heart cried out for.

  The seconds and minutes seemed to move slowly, and Kefira looked up and saw two vultures circling overhead. They were so high they were mere dots, and she wondered if they had found her. This increased her fear, and she shut her eyes more tightly.