In some ways, he guessed, it had all made him a better father, even though he’d had one psychology professor who had hinted that it would, someday, make him a terrible parent if he didn’t watch himself carefully. The professor, knowing that Broadway ran in his blood, quoted South Pacific to make his point, observing almost ruefully, “You’ve got to be taught to hate.” Arguably, that childhood had made him a terrible first husband in ways he was still analyzing, but he loved little Marc madly and had striven mightily to be a kind and forward-thinking father. He had never spanked the boy, not once. He and his ex-wife both bought into what his mother referred to dismissively as “all that Dr. Spock mumbo-jumbo.” He sure as hell would never lock their boy in a closet.
The one time that Roman had hit Billy, he’d hit him hard, which more than anything was why it had come back to him that moment in the Land Rover. His infraction? When he was seventeen, he’d said something dismissive over a Monday night dinner, the whole family together at the dining room table, about his kid sister’s performance in one of their father’s shows. Then, in a moment of classic teenage brinksmanship, he had dug in his heels and refused to apologize to either his sister or his father, which caused the event to escalate. And suddenly, out of the blue, his father backhanded him, sending him falling backward out of the chair and onto the thick Oriental carpet on the floor.
Yes, his parents had raised Katie in ways that were cruel too, but they were demonstrably less sadistic than the ways they treated him. It wasn’t that she was a girl and it wasn’t that she was younger and it wasn’t that she was a second child and they had figured some things out by then. It was just that she was…Katie. Even at two and three, you just knew that she was going to be a star, and so Roman and Glenda Stepanov were constitutionally predisposed to be gentler with her.
Or, at least, to not risk disfiguring her.
Katie claimed not to recall much of what she had witnessed them do to him—though fuzzy snippets had stuck, and they’d discussed some of the stranger moments when his first marriage was unraveling—but he supposed that she really had repressed much of it. Nevertheless, she hated her mother as much as he did, and she had hated her father until the day he died as much as her brother had. Billy supposed it was why he was so very close to a kid sister five years his junior.
Still, the mind was the damnedest thing: repression was a gift reserved for the Katie Barstows of the world. Mere mortals like him? Too often you couldn’t mine the recollections that might keep you sane, but instead held close the memories that someday would kill you.
* * *
.?.?.
The Land Rover left the pavement and continued, based on the sun, to the west on grass that had been grazed almost to dirt. They drove for thirty minutes, once again occasionally spotting wild animals—warthogs and wildebeest, more gazelles, a small group of elephants—and then he saw ahead of them a kraal, a Maasai livestock pen. They coasted to a stop before it, and Billy saw that it was made from poisonous candelabra branches and thorn brush and some spiky wood he couldn’t identify. Nearby he counted eight round huts built mostly from cow dung and mud. He saw neither people nor their herds: not cattle or goats.
“It’s deserted,” Margie murmured.
He nodded. The group had either moved elsewhere or been evicted by their kidnappers. He was still holding a wad of toilet paper against his nose, but he thought the bleeding had stopped and so he gently pulled it away. It was sore, the pain coming in waves. He decided it wasn’t broken, but he really had no idea.
The driver reached under his seat and pulled out his pistol. Then he hopped from the vehicle, lifted the hinged timber that served as the gate to the kraal, and went inside. The fellow in the last row of seats, who Billy had begun to suspect was a mercenary of some sort—a hired gun who had seen all manner of carnage over the years—told them to stay where they were.
“Do you think the others are going to be brought here too?” David asked softly.
Billy wasn’t sure whether his friend expected an answer or was just thinking out loud, but he answered him: “No. I think we’re in at least two groups. Maybe three. They’ve definitely separated us.”
“I agree,” said Terrance.
They watched the driver wander into each and every hut, spending no more than a few seconds in each, before emerging. Apparently, he was making absolutely certain that each was empty. When he was done, he yelled that the place was clear, and the fellow in the back told them to get out too. Then their driver ordered them to walk fifteen feet from the Rover. It was a strangely precise order. He was pointing with his pistol.