Things We Do in the Dark(48)

Okay, fine, so he only knows this because of the movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster. It was one of his and Joey’s favorites, and they would find any excuse to work the line into a conversation. It drove Simone nuts.

Drew: I can’t find my wallet, I think someone stole it.

Joey: Did you check the jeans you were wearing yesterday?

Drew: Found it!

Joey: The simplest explanation is usually the right one.

Simone: Oh my God, would the two of you shut the fuck up?



A good chunk of people who are considered “missing” are either dead or don’t want to be found. If Mae is still alive, then whatever she stole from Vinny and the Blood Brothers—Drew is guessing drugs—is the reason she can never come back.

The thing is, though, it’s not that easy to disappear. You can’t just go someplace new and get a job and rent a house and start over. First, you’d need a new name, which requires new ID, which takes time to procure. You’d have to keep your story straight for anybody new that you meet. And you’d need start-up money. In cash. A lot of it. To assume a whole new identity and build a whole new life takes time, commitment, and an exceptional talent for telling lies.

Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation, the one that makes the most sense, is that Mae is dead. Vinny killed her, and then Vinny got killed, because that’s what gangs like his do. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that.

But did Vinny murder Joey, too? If Drew is being logical about it, the answer is probably no. The fire in the basement apartment was ruled an accident all those years ago, and there was never anything back then—nor is there now—to suggest otherwise.

Drew needs to accept that maybe he wants the fire to not have been an accident so there’s someone to blame for Joey’s death, other than himself.

He sighs into the silence of the car. It would have been nice to have a conversation with Betty Savage, one of the few people Joey let herself get close to during the last year of her life, the year Drew wasn’t a part of. There are probably a thousand things Mae could have told him about Joey, like how she decided to become a stripper, and why, out of all the names in the world, she would choose to call herself Ruby.

Joey used to call her mother Ruby. Literally. She hardly ever referred to her as “Mom” or “Mother.” Drew can still remember asking her about it, because the conversation it led to was the last one they ever had while they were still living together. Simone was taking the job in Vancouver whether Drew was coming or not, and he had not yet decided.

“Why do you call your mother by her first name?” he’d asked Joey.

It was just the two of them in their usual spots on the sofa, eating junk food in front of the TV while Simone worked a dinner shift at The Keg. They were watching Showgirls, which was arguably the worst movie in the history of cinema, but he and Joey loved it precisely because it was terrible. The two of them would compete to see who could remember the best worst lines.

Zack: Nice dress.

Nomi: It’s a Ver-SAYSE.

Al: You’re a fucking stripper, don’t you get it?

Nomi: I’m a DANCER!



“Do I call her Ruby?” Joey seemed surprised, and then she grew thoughtful. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess I do. That’s weird, right? You don’t think of your mother as Brenda, do you?”

“No, because my mom’s name is Belinda,” Drew said, and they shared a laugh. “I don’t know if it’s weird. After everything she put you through, thinking of her as Ruby instead of ‘Mom’ probably gives you some emotional distance.”

“The night she was arrested, I was worried about her,” Joey said. “She was on a rampage, ripping photos off the wall, breaking plates, threatening to jump off the balcony. She’d been a paranoid mess ever since Charles’s body was discovered, and I was scared she’d actually hurt herself. But when the cops showed up, they took one look at me and arrested her on the spot. Which was ironic, because she’d only hit me a few times that night.”

Only. That night. “You looked that bad?”

She shrugged. “Bloody lip, black eye, the usual. But later, at the hospital, they did a more thorough examination. I guess they didn’t like what they found.”

From her file, Drew knows now that the hospital discovered bruises on Joey’s buttocks, back, and inner thighs. X-rays showed that her ribs had been broken twice in the past, along with her wrist. There were old cigarette burns on her upper arms and one just above her collarbone. Some of the injuries were recent. Some had been there a very long time.

And the hospital discovered other things, too.

“If I hadn’t given the social worker my diaries, the police would never have known what Ruby did to Charles,” Joey said. “She might have gotten away with it.”

When the cops came to question Ruby about Charles Baxter’s murder the first time, Ruby had given them an alibi. She was with her daughter, she said. They’d gone out to a movie that Saturday night, and she could prove it because Joey still had the ticket stubs in the pocket of the shorts she had worn.

But Joey’s diary told a different story. They never made it to the movie. They went to Charles’s house, where, at some point in the night, Ruby and Charles had argued, and Ruby stabbed him. Her bloody dress was found in a trash bag in the large bin behind their apartment building, along with the murder weapon. Sorry, murder weapons. Both of them. Ruby had tasked her thirteen-year-old daughter with disposing of the evidence, and Joey didn’t know where else to put it.