“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.
During opening statements, the crown attorney told the jury that Charles Baxter was stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife. Based on the haphazard entry points all over his torso—sixteen of them in total—the crown argued it was done in a rage by a woman the same height as Ruby. Miraculously, no major arteries were hit. Later, the medical examiner testified that if Ruby had stopped there, and if Baxter had received emergency treatment, he likely would have lived. The charge could have been aggravated assault. Maybe even self-defense, if her lawyer was savvy.
But it had not stopped there. While Charles lay bleeding on his bedroom floor, Ruby walked down the hall to his daughter’s room. She removed one of Lexi Baxter’s ice skates from the closet and brought it back with her into the master bedroom, where she took a seat on the chair in the corner. Ruby put the skate on, laced it up, and then stomped on her lover’s neck.
Boom. First-degree murder.
Charles Baxter was nearly decapitated. And that’s why Ruby Reyes was called the Ice Queen.
“People always assumed Ruby was cold,” Joey said. “But she was the opposite. She was hot-tempered. She could scald you.” She fingered her pendant absently. “But sometimes, she could be warm. On her good days, she was sunshine, and there was nowhere else I ever wanted to be.”
“Do you still love her?” Drew asked. “After everything?”
“She’s my mother,” Joey said simply. “Everything I feel for her is intense, and I feel it all at once. Intense love, intense fear, intense hate. They all swirl together, like … I don’t know, like melted Neapolitan ice cream. The flavors are impossible to separate.”
“It’s okay to feel different things at once.”
She smiled. “You should be a psychologist.”
“Thought about it,” Drew said. “What about you? What did you want to be when you grew up?”
“I never expected to grow up.”
Drew kissed her then. He didn’t think about it, he just leaned over and kissed her. Her lips were salty from the potato chips they were eating, her breath sweet from the orange Fanta they were drinking. She kissed him back, and it felt right, and good, and he couldn’t remember the last time he kissed someone he cared about so much. He loved Simone, but with Joey, it felt like his feelings were on an entirely different level. It was terrifying, and wrong, and amazing, and right.