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

Landlines and satellite phones can be a valuable resource when power and cell towers fail. It can help to invest in one or more of these if you live in a hurricane-prone area.

I woke to the ringing of my phone.

But that was impossible. When I’d gone to sleep the night before, there’d been no cell service.

Maybe service had been restored overnight. Why not? The storm was clearly over. The walls were no longer creaking, and I could see sunlight peeping in through the slats of the shutters over the library window.

I rolled over on the air mattress—disturbing Gary, who’d been curled up comfortably in his customary position against my legs—and grabbed my cell, squinting at it in the morning light.

But no. The screen was black. And my cell wasn’t ringing. Something else very near me was.

I sat up, looked around, and realized that the source of the ringing was an old-fashioned telephone sitting on a pedestal table beside the pink-cushioned chair. I hadn’t noticed it before, although beside the phone was, of all things, an old-fashioned answering machine, like Rachel and Monica had had on the television show Friends.

A moment later the answering machine switched on, and I heard Lucy Hartwell’s cheerful voice say, “Hello, you’ve reached the Hartwells! We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, number, and a message, we’ll get right ba—”

I heard a click, and then evidently the line was picked up on an extension in another part of the house.

“Hello?” Lucy Hartwell asked.

“Hello? Lucy?” A woman’s voice came on over the machine.

“Oh, Joanne!” Mrs. Hartwell sounded excited to hear from her friend. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, we’re fine, fine. No damage at all, except we lost a few trees. You?”

“Same here. That was quite a storm last night, though, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, terrible, just terrible. Though not as bad as they were saying it was going to be.”

“Oh, nowhere near.” Joanne and Mrs. Hartwell seemed to have no idea that their voices were being recorded, or that I could hear every word they were saying.

“Though my sister Gail called from Chicago. She says on the news, they’re reporting that Little Bridge has been wiped off the face of the map.”

“No!”

“Oh, of course. But not based on any actual reporting, since they never bothered to send any journalists here, before or after the storm. So how would they even know?”

Mrs. Hartwell’s tone was indignant. “Fake news. Was there even any flooding?”

“Well, the lobby of the Cascabel. But it always floods. How is the Mermaid?”

“Ed went down to check on it at first light. Sandbags kept the water out.”

“Well, that’s a relief!”

“Yes. What about Sandy Point?” Mrs. Hartwell’s voice was elaborately casual. “Any news?”

“No, sorry, hon.” Joanne’s tone was gentle. “No one can get near it—the roads are too bad. But have you heard about the bridge?”

“Which bridge?”

“The one from the island to the highway to the mainland. Gone.”

“No!”

“They’re saying a yacht from the Little Bridge Yacht Club got loose from its moorings and floated free and struck the pilings in just the right place.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!”

“No one is going to be able to get on or off the island, possibly for weeks, depending on how long it takes them to shore it up. Which means everyone who evacuated is stuck wherever they are.”

“Those poor souls!”

“Anyway, would it be all right if I dropped off some of Carl’s insulin to keep in your fridge? We have it in a cooler for now, but who knows how long we’ll be able to keep getting ice.”

“Oh, of course, Joanne. Come over anytime. And we’ve got plenty of hot food and cold beer.”

“Lu, you’re an angel. See you soon.”

The two women hung up. I looked at Gary, who was happily kneading my thigh. Wow, I mouthed.

I grabbed some fresh clothes and jumped into the shower, bathing and dressing in record time. Then I followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Hartwell whisking what looked like the contents of an entire carton of eggs in a red plastic bowl.

“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. She, like me, was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, only her T-shirt was overlarge whereas mine was slightly too small. Both, however, had Mermaid Café written on them. “Did you sleep all right?”

“I did, thank you so much.” It seemed incredible to me that anyone could sleep through a hurricane, but the monotonous roar of the wind and pounding rain—or maybe the extremely low barometric pressure—had eventually knocked me out. I’d slept as soundly as a baby. “Would you like some help with that?”

“I’ve got bread toasting. You can help butter them when they pop up. There’s coffee in the machine, just grab a cup from the shelf there and press the silver button. The girls aren’t up yet, but when they are I’ll have them set the table.”

“Great.” I didn’t want to say that I’d overheard her phone call, but I wanted to ask for more details about the storm damage. I also wanted to know if she’d heard from Drew. I tried for a general “So, have you heard anything about . . . the storm?”

“Well, it’s not as bad around here as they were saying it was going to be.” She set down her bowl to add salt and pepper to it. “Mostly wind damage, no flooding except for where you’d expect it. But I understand that farther up the Keys, it’s quite a disaster. And the bridge that connects us to the highway to the mainland is out.”

I widened my eyes, feigning surprise. “No!”

“Yes. And it could be for quite a while. So anyone who evacuated won’t be able to get back for a bit.”

“That’s terrible.” I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask: “And have you heard from your nephew?”

Mrs. Hartwell’s cheerful smile wavered only slightly. “Not yet. And since he doesn’t have a landline, and cell service is still out, we can’t call. But I’m sure he’ll show up here soon.”

I tried to keep my tone light, to match hers. “And you can’t drive over there and check?”

It was the wrong thing to say. The smile collapsed. “Haven’t you looked outside?”

Of course I hadn’t. I’d seen the sun shining through the shutters and assumed all was well—except for the bridge, of course.

Mrs. Hartwell, seeing my puzzled expression, took me by the elbow and steered me from the kitchen, down the hallway, through the dining room, past the sleeping girls in the living room, past my own room, and to the front door.

“Look,” she said, and threw the door open.

I gasped. I couldn’t help it.

The Hartwells’ beautifully landscaped front yard was gone.

Oh, it was still there, of course. But instead of the neat brick path leading up to the wide, airy front porch, I saw nothing but leaves and branches and refuse—actual trash, people’s garbage that had probably been ripped from the trash can I’d seen blowing around, a pizza box here, a cat food can there—carpeting the entire front lawn.

The street was worse. There an actual tree had fallen across the width of the road, taking a power line down with it. Neighbors had gathered in the street to stare at it, many of them holding coffee mugs that I recognized as being the same pattern as the one I held. They’d come from the Hartwells’ home. While I’d been sleeping, Mrs. Hartwell had been busy serving coffee to her neighbors, none of whom had electricity to power their own coffeemakers.

These same neighbors turned when they heard Mrs. Hartwell open her front door now and waved at us. Mrs. Hartwell waved back, but distractedly.

“Ed can’t get to the beach to check on Drew,” she told me. “The roads are like this all around the neighborhood. Thank goodness no one was hurt—on this side of the island, anyway. No one’s house was damaged, either—well, except for Beverly’s; she forgot to board up in the back, so she got a tree branch through her kitchen windows. But she’s a snowbird who won’t even be down again until November, so there’s plenty of time to clean up her place before she gets here. But it could be days until they get the streets clear enough for anyone to be able to get out to Drew—”

I stood staring at the mess in the front yard. It was so horrible. The palm trees had fared better than the gumbo-limbo—it had lost whole limbs. The palms had only been stripped of their fronds. All of it was going to take months, potentially years, to return to its former leafy glory.

Then I noticed my scooter. It was sitting exactly where Drew had left it. It was coated now in leaves and mud, but otherwise it was untouched by the storm.

I was already formulating a plan inside my head, but I didn’t dare mention it out loud, because I wasn’t sure I had the courage to carry it out.

“I’m sure Drew’s fine,” I said to Mrs. Hartwell, as we both went back inside the mercifully air-conditioned house. Outside, the post-storm heat was so oppressive, my shirt had begun sticking to my skin almost immediately. If Drew was still alive—and that was a big if—he had to be miserable. “Maybe the storm wasn’t so bad out on the water.”

Mrs. Hartwell looked at me as if I’d said maybe the sky isn’t blue.

“Of course it was,” she said. “I’ve already heard they lost most of the boats over in the marina.”

That was it, I decided. I was going to go through with my plan, crazy as it seemed.

“Where’s Ed?” I asked.

Mrs. Hartwell waved a hand toward the back of the house. “In the backyard. But don’t waste your breath talking to him—he’s in a foul mood.”

I went anyway. Ed was usually in a foul mood at work, so I was used to this.

I got as far as the back porch before I saw that this time, however, he had good reason to feel ill-tempered.

The Hartwells’ beautiful backyard, in which they’d held such a memorable hurricane party only the other night, was unrecognizable. Their glimmering blue jewel of a swimming pool? Gone. In its place was a swamp, a hot, steamy, disgusting mud bath filled to overflowing with palm fronds and other vegetable debris. Most of the rest of the trees in the yard had lost limbs or were down entirely, the lovely footpaths lost under layers of foliage. The ylang-ylang blossoms, which had given off such a beautiful scent the night of the party, now sat rotting on the ground in the burning sun, giving off a sickly sweet smell of decay.

In the center of the yard, next to the pool, stood Ed, holding a long-poled net as he attempted to shovel as much of the muck from his pool as he could, a little at a time, though it appeared to me to be a futile effort. It was never going to be the same as it was before.

“Oh, Ed,” I said, once I’d made my way gingerly across the storm wreckage to his side. I saw flashes of purple, then orange, then yellow beneath my sneakered feet. The orchids—the beautiful orchids that had been growing from the trunks of the royal palms. The blossoms had been ripped from their stems by the wind, whirled through the air, and then thrown, bruised and battered, to the ground. “I’m so sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” he demanded crossly. “It’ll clean up.”

It never would. Or maybe it would, but it would take weeks. Months. Maybe years.

“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

“Instead of being sorry,” he said testily, “you could go grab a net and help.”

It was so hot and swampy, I could hear mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. Drew had been wrong about my lavender candle. The candle would have been very useful right about now.

“Okay,” I said, though I had no intention of helping with the pool. I had other plans. “Maybe after breakfast. Ed, do you have any extra gas?”

“What do you mean, do I have any extra gas? Of course I’ve got extra gas. What do you want with it?”

“I want to use it to top off my scooter.”

“So you can go where? There’s nowhere to go. Everything’s closed, including the bridge. Didn’t you hear? No one can get in or out of here.”

“Come on, Ed, I’m not trying to leave Little Bridge. Why do you have to be so nosy? I just have places to go, okay?”

“Have you seen it out there?” He pointed in the direction of the street. “There’re trees and power lines down all over the place.”

“I know that, Ed. A car couldn’t make the drive. But a scooter could. That’s why it’s called a scooter. It scoots around hazards like that.” I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded good.

“And I do know what a downed power line looks like,” I continued. “So I’ll avoid them.”

Ed looked at me long and hard. He hadn’t shaved that morning, which was unusual for Ed, and showed the agitated state of his emotions. Ed always arrived at the Mermaid each morning freshly shaved and wearing a neatly pressed Mermaid Café T-shirt, in jeans, never shorts, out of respect for his position as owner, despite the heat outside or in the kitchen.

“Well, I’m not going to give you gas for that,” he said, finally. “That’d be like giving you gas to kill yourself. And later on I’m gonna need your help. I hafta go down to the café and open it up and start feeding folks there. There’s gonna be a lotta hungry people who stayed and didn’t prepare properly, and it’s gonna be our responsibility to take care of them. Can’t count on FEMA to do it. Might take days until they get here, if at all. And I gotta start getting rid of food before it rots. Don’t have a generator over at the Mermaid. That’s probably something I shoulda done, instead of investing in one here.”

His gaze flicked in the direction of the house’s generator, which I could hear grinding away over by the pool table (which had miraculously remained intact; it was too heavy to have been blown over by the wind, though the cover was gone, the green felt now sodden and covered in leaves and other storm debris).

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be happy to come back and help you with that. Just as soon as I’ve found your nephew.”