No Judgments: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 1)

Emergency Disaster Survival Kit Basics—Personal

Hand sanitizer or disinfectant wipes

Travel-size beauty products

Toilet paper, paper towels, garbage bags

Dental care and vision products

Blankets, sheets, pillow

Clothing, no-rinse detergent

I didn’t know what had happened until I emerged from the bathroom after spending a long time under the hot water, washing the smell of gasoline and Drew Hartwell’s dogs from my body. That’s when I heard the cry.

“He’s not coming back!”

I rushed into the kitchen just in time to see Mrs. Hartwell press a hand to her mouth as she gazed down at the screen of her cell phone.

My heart sank. I knew exactly whom she was talking about, but for propriety’s sake, I had to pretend that I didn’t.

“Who’s not coming back, Mrs. H?” I asked.

“Drew. He just wrote.” She held up her phone so I could see the text she’d just received, although it was difficult to read, since her fingers were trembling a little. She wasn’t a woman who wore her heart on a sleeve but it was clear she was upset. “He says the roads by the beach are already so bad, he doesn’t think he can get back here safely, so he’s going to wait out the storm with his dogs at that ridiculous house of his. He’s not coming back here. He’s not coming back!”

I patted her on the back as comfortingly as I could. I realized that what Drew had said to his aunt in Spanish before we’d left to pick up my bike must have been an assurance that he’d be back to hunker down for the storm with her.

Of course he’d been lying. He’d never had any intention of spending the storm anywhere but his beach house. But, like a typical male, he’d been too cowardly to tell his aunt so to her face.

“Now, Lu.” Ed had come in from the dining room and was as matter-of-fact about his nephew’s reckless choice as he was about everything else. “The boy will be fine.”

“He won’t.” Mrs. Hartwell sounded as close to tears as I’d ever heard her. “He’s going to die out there.”

“Unlikely. He’s got a boat. Worse comes to worst, he’ll get himself and those dogs of his into it and ride out the storm there.”

Understandably, this did not seem to comfort the anxious woman.

“He’s got nothing! No generator, no landline, no satellite phone—”

“He’s got his wits.” Ed walked over to the counter to check on the ropa vieja his wife was cooking for dinner, the ingredients for which had all gone into a slow cooker. The smell that emanated from it when Ed lifted the lid was so appetizing, my mouth almost watered. “Mmm, now that’s going to be delicious, Lu.”

His wife ignored this compliment. “He’s going to die.”

“He’s been through lots of these storms before, Aunt Lucy,” Nevaeh said. She’d come into the kitchen as well to see what all the fuss was about, and now she wrapped a comforting arm around her aunt’s waist. “He’ll know just what to do. Uncle Drew always does.”

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe he knew just what to do when it came to construction and hauling motorbikes.

When it came to matters of the heart, however, not so much.

Then again, I was no champ in that department, either.

It was just then that it happened: a flash of lightning so strong—accompanied by a boom of thunder at the same time, indicating that a storm cell was directly over us—that the lights flickered, then went out.

Nevaeh and Katie screamed as if their throats were being slit. The parrot, in the living room, joined them.

“No worries, no worries.” Ed puttered toward the counter, where a powerful-looking flashlight sat. It was still daytime, but the thick clouds overhead coupled with the tightly closed shutter over every window had made the house as dark inside as if it were dusk. “I had the propane in the generator topped off this morning, so we should be—”

There was a groaning sound—like a powerful boat engine starting up—and suddenly the lights flickered on again. That sound—the groaning—had apparently been the sound of the Hartwells’ generator springing to life, as it was programmed to do the minute the city’s electric grid failed. Fueled by the thousand-gallon propane tank Drew had mentioned, the Hartwell house was now being powered by its generator.

“Oh, thank God,” I heard Nevaeh cry. She’d run into the living room to check on the television. “But the cable’s completely out!”

“Yep.” Ed didn’t look particularly surprised. “Can’t believe it lasted as long as it did.”

The island’s cable television service was the source of most of the jeers in the “Cheers and Jeers” section of the newspaper. It seemed to go out weekly, even when the weather was fair, and when it was foul, forget about it. Satellite dish service was worse, because any amount of rain, even up the island chain, could knock it out. Many of my customers could predict when rain was on its way based solely on the amount of pixilation on their television screens.

Nevaeh, her face pale, came back into the kitchen, waving her cell phone in the air.

“The Internet isn’t working!”

Mrs. Hartwell managed a smile. “I’m sure you girls can live without the Internet for a few days.”

“A few days?” Katie looked as panic stricken as if someone had suggested she live without oxygen.

“You do know that some of us lived almost our entire lives without the Internet?” Mrs. Hartwell seemed amused. “I managed to graduate from high school and college without ever using it once.”

Nevaeh’s eyes widened. “How did you even have a social life, let alone do homework?”

“It was called the library.” Mrs. Hartwell didn’t look so amused anymore. “And we used something called a telephone to contact one another. You know, if you girls are bored, I’ve got a cake that needs fixing.”

Nevaeh smiled apologetically at her great-aunt. “Sorry, Aunt Lu. Of course we’ll come help you. Katie, come on, let’s go wash our hands.”

Katie followed her friend, her gaze never wavering from her phone screen. “You know, Nevaeh, there’s still cell service. I just got a text from Madison.”

Once the two girls had left the room, I smiled at Mrs. Hartwell, who was gazing after her great-niece with a look of half-concern, half-adoration.

“Are Katie’s parents worried about her being out in this weather?” I asked. Wind was sucking at the wooden shutters that covered the living room windows, causing them to creak. The walls of the house itself seemed to be swaying slightly—but Mrs. H had warned me this would happen. The house had been built to do this.

“The sheriff? Oh, no.” Mrs. Hartwell waved a hand dismissively. “He asked if she could stay here. She didn’t want to stay with him over at the high school. And who can blame her, with her dad working, and her best friend and cousin here?”

It dawned on me, slowly, that Katie was a Hartwell, too—Sheriff Hartwell’s daughter. Was everyone in this town related, by blood or marriage, to the Hartwells?

“Wasn’t there something here in the kitchen you wanted my help with?” I asked brightly. Not that I actually felt like helping. I felt like screaming, like Mrs. H had done when she’d received Drew’s text.

But since they’d been so gracious as to house me, it seemed like the least I could do.

And a project seemed like a good way to keep my mind off what was happening outside.

“Oh. Yes, actually. If you wouldn’t mind . . .”

Which was how I found myself, a half hour later, standing at the kitchen counter, using a hand mixer to stir up a batch of what Drew’s aunt called “hurricane dip.”

“It’s so addictive,” she explained to me. “You really can’t have it in the house anytime except during a hurricane. Otherwise you’d be eating it all day long.”

I believed her . . . and also knew why this wouldn’t be the best thing, at least for anyone who cared about their health, since the sole ingredients for “hurricane dip” were mayonnaise, sour cream, and cream cheese, along with “about half a bottle” of barbecue sauce.

My job was to mix all of these ingredients together until they were a light orange color, making sure there were no lumps—difficult to do, considering the cream cheese.

I tried not to ask myself why mixing together a lot of heart-attack-inducing ingredients seemed to be the job for which Drew’s aunt felt I was most suited. I did have other skills beyond food preparation . . .

But none that would be particularly useful under these circumstances. Law school didn’t exactly prepare one for a hurricane, at least not a literal one. All of that cerebral stuff was as handy in this situation as my mom deemed art to be.

The only bright spot that I could see about my being pigeonholed into the role of resident dip maker was that Nevaeh and Katie had it a lot worse. They were being forced to make the lemon pudding cake of which Drew had spoken so disparagingly, and which involved a package of yellow cake mix combined with—what else?—a package of lemon pudding.

Although, as long as you were a fan of lemon (which I was), how bad could it be?

“That looks done,” Mrs. Hartwell said, peering into the bowl I was holding. “Let’s try it and see.”

She plunged a chip—the “ruffled kind” were the best for this particular dip, she’d informed me—into the contents of the bowl and then brought the chip and dip to her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

“Mmmm.” She closed her eyes, something I’d noticed she did often while eating. “Perfection.”

“Really?”

I wasn’t sure how anything made up of so many different condiments could be any good, so I grabbed a chip and tasted it, too.

I was surprised by the tangy flavor explosion in my mouth. “Oh my God.”

Mrs. Hartwell grinned at me. “You see? That’s why we can only have it around during hurricanes. Otherwise we’d all be the size of trucks. Well, I already am.” She patted her pleasantly curved belly. “But I don’t need to be getting any bigger, or I’d have to go to Miami to buy all new clothes.” There was no place to buy clothes in Little Bridge, except expensive boutiques that no locals could afford, and a Kmart on the outskirts of town. “Throw some plastic wrap on that and put it in the fridge so it can set, and then go rest up awhile. You deserve it.”

“We should eat soon,” Ed announced, wandering back into the kitchen. “The real heavy stuff is going to start coming down in an hour or so.”

His wife nodded and began filling a pot of water. I looked at him questioningly. “How do you know when the heavy stuff is going to get here? The cable is out, and there’s no Internet.”

He sent me a withering glance, then held up a small metal box. “Radio. Ever heard of it before?”

“Oh. Of course.” I flushed with embarrassment, remembering I hadn’t told him who my mother was.

But it seemed better not to, for a variety of reasons. Not everyone was a fan of Judge Justine. I didn’t know how Ed and Lucy Hartwell would feel about her.

“What kind of radio do you have?” I asked.

Ed, excited to show off his gadget, set his battery-operated shortwave radio on the counter and turned up the volume so I could appreciate the sound quality.

“Oh, Ed, no,” Mrs. Hartwell exclaimed as she rinsed the rice. “I don’t want to hear those two idiots. We were having such a nice peaceful time—”

I have no idea how anyone could describe this situation as peaceful, given how powerfully the wind outside was blowing. The shutters on the windows were all shaking, and the special pine the house was made of, despite its reputation for being so strong, was doing a bit of creaking as well.

But this apparently did not alarm the Hartwells at all.

“They aren’t idiots.” Ed sounded offended. “They are professional radio journalists who are risking their lives to stay on the air over there at the airport after everyone else has evacuated in order to bring us the weather—”

Aunt Lu snorted. “Risking their lives! They’re in a bomb shelter. The only way they’ll be risking their lives is if their broadcasting antenna blows down and one of them is stupid enough to go outside to try to repair it, which I wouldn’t be surprised to—”

“Shhhh.” Ed turned up the volume of his radio.

The voices of two men filled the kitchen.

“We’ve just clocked a wind gust of a hundred and eleven miles an hour,” one of the men—who later identified himself as Wayne the Toad Licker—said. “That definitely puts us at a Cat Three.”

“It does, Wayne,” said his cohost, whose call sign I subsequently learned was Fred the Head. “But do we want to depend on mere technical instruments? Wouldn’t we get a more accurate reading if you went out there and . . . you know?”

“No, Fred. I won’t do it.”

“You swore on the Conch Republic flag that you would!”

“Fred, I’m not a masochist. I’m not going out there.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of Little Bridge, if you’re just tuning in and wondering what my esteemed colleague and I are discussing, it’s the fact that Wayne lost a bet, and as the loser he is supposed to go out into the parking lot of our station here and attempt to measure the winds of Hurricane Marilyn by spitting into them. And yet here he is, reneging on our—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Mrs. Hartwell burst out. “This is the silliest, most revolting thing I’ve ever heard. Turn it off.”

Ed only turned up the volume. “Now, Lu,” he said gravely. “These gentlemen are providing a valuable service to the community. Everyone who’s listening is having their mind kept off the storm, which is what we all need right now.” He glanced at me. “Wouldn’t you say so?”

I didn’t want to get into the middle of my employers’ marital squabble. Besides which, I was beginning to worry. The airport was less than a mile from Sandy Point Beach, where Drew was building his house. If the winds there were already up to Category 3 strength and the eye of the storm wasn’t even on us, was it remotely safe for him to be there? It didn’t seem like it.

“I mean, they seem dumb,” I said of Fred the Head and Wayne the Toad Licker. “But entertaining.”

“And informative.” Ed took a small notebook and pen from his shirtfront pocket and began jotting something down. “So, if it’s seven o’clock now, and the winds are already at over a hundred miles per hour, that means the eye should pass over at around—”

Mrs. Hartwell snapped, “Oh, for pity’s sake, Ed. I don’t want to hear it! Our nephew could be dying out there and you’re standing there estimating exactly what time it’s going to happen!”

Ed shrugged, still calculating. “I’m sorry, but it’s better to be prepared for these things.”

“Girls!” Mrs. Hartwell spun around and called to the teenagers. “Girls, come help set the table. We’re going to eat dinner soon. Although to be honest,” she turned to say to me, “I don’t think I could eat a bite, I’m so worried. You?”

“Um.” I suddenly thought of something. “Hold on a minute. I think I have just the thing.”