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

Never venture outside after a storm until local authorities have deemed it safe. Hidden hazards such as damaged electrical equipment can cause life-threatening injuries.

Ed Hartwell threw back the door to his toolshed—the one next to which he’d built the rabbit hutch—and revealed he’d filled almost the entire thing with red plastic canisters of gasoline.

“Wow,” I said, eyeing them. “I’m really glad I didn’t know about this during the storm.”

He didn’t understand why I found the idea of one hundred gallons of fuel sitting in a wood shed during hundred-mile wind gusts upsetting.

“Why?” He grabbed one of the five-gallon canisters. “It’s totally safe. Unless somebody came out here and smoked.”

The problem was, people had been out there smoking during the hurricane party. The canisters had to have been there then, and Ed had never said a word.

I thought it better not to mention this. What was done was done.

After cleaning the leaves and mud off my motorbike, then topping it off with fuel, Ed had a few pieces of parting advice for me.

“Anyone waves to you, don’t stop,” he said. “No matter how desperate they look for help. They’re probably only after your bike.”

“Jeez, Ed,” I said. “This is Little Bridge, not The Walking Dead. Do you really think that’s going to happen?”

“It might,” he said. “That’s why, just in case, you might want to bring this along.”

He rolled up a pants leg and revealed that he wore an ankle holster. Tucked inside was a snub-nosed .22.

I recoiled at the sight of it.

“Ed. No. No way.”

Of course I’d heard the rumors that Ed Hartwell walked around armed. For what other reason, Angela often argued, would a sixty-five-year-old man in reasonably good health wear a fanny pack, if not to hold a small pistol? His wallet, keys, and cell phone weren’t in it. We could clearly see the outlines of those things in the back pockets of his jeans.

We knew that ever since Wilhelmina, when the Mermaid’s cash register and meat slicer had been looted, Ed had begun keeping a pistol strapped beneath the counter, near the pie window display.

I’d been told, however, that he’d never had occasion to use it, due to the frequency with which members of law enforcement dined at the Mermaid.

But now I had incontrovertible proof that Angela was right: Ed was packing heat, only not in his “bum bag,” as the British tourists we frequently served referred to fanny packs, but in an ankle holster.

“Ed,” I said. “I’m literally only going across town. I do not need a gun.”

“Do you know how to fire one?” he asked, ignoring me.

The funny thing was, I did. You did not grow up the daughter of Judge Justine and a Manhattan defense attorney without, at some point, being taken to a gun range and offered target lessons by one of their well-meaning if dodgy clients. My dad, in particular, had defended some fairly reprehensible individuals—old-school mafiosos, dirty politicians, Russian mobsters, hired killers.

But that didn’t mean I hadn’t enjoyed the lessons. Especially the part where everyone had praised me for turning out to be an excellent shot. Something about my hand-eye coordination.

“Of course I do,” I said. “But, Ed, who’s going to try to steal my scooter? The bridge is out. The only people on the island right now are locals. And you can’t honestly tell me that you think someone who lives here would—”

“Just take it with you.” Ed shoved the pistol at me. “You never know. Someone could come here on a boat or a plane to—”

“—steal my used, ten-year-old scooter?”

“Just take it. You’re a pretty young woman. It’d make me feel a lot better about letting you do this if you had a way to defend yourself. The piece is already loaded. Safety’s here—”

“I know where the safety is, Ed.”

I took the gun from him before he could flash it around some more. There were plenty of people walking around on the street, happy not to be cooped up in their homes now that the storm was over.

I shoved the gun into my backpack, into which I’d also packed a few bottles of water and a warm, foil-wrapped Cuban breakfast sandwich that Mrs. Hartwell had insisted on making for Drew when she’d heard where I was headed.

“Please bring him back to me,” she’d whispered, tears in her eyes—the whisper was because Katie was on the landline, talking to her dad, and Mrs. Hartwell didn’t want to disturb her. The tears were because she was so moved by my offer to go find Drew.

“Don’t worry, I will,” I’d assured her. I hadn’t wanted to voice my fears about what I was really going to find once I got out to Sandy Point, which was nothing but rubble.

Katie came in just at that moment, looking perturbed.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Mrs. H asked. “Is your dad all right?”

“Oh, he’s fine.” Katie lifted a piece of toast and nibbled on it absently. “Everyone over at the high school made it through the storm okay. The jail, too. But I guess things are pretty bad over by the bridge. There’s already a traffic jam on the other side, locals trying to get back to their homes. Only they can’t because there’s no safe way through. Dad’s there now, dealing with them. He wants me to call my mom in Miami and let her know I’m okay.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hartwell, “you should. I’m sure she’s worried sick about you. You know they’re saying on the news that Little Bridge was destroyed in the storm.”

“I know,” Katie said. “It’s just that I don’t feel like talking to my mom. She’s such a—”

Mrs. Hartwell gasped. “Katie!”

I knew how Katie felt, though. I probably should have used the Hartwells’ landline to call my own mother and let her know I was all right. But like Katie, I didn’t want to, either. There was something weirdly restful and almost comforting about being cut off from the rest of the world, without cell service, Internet, and television . . .

Well, except the part about not knowing whether Drew Hartwell was dead or alive.

But I intended to remedy that.

I was familiar with the drive out to Sandy Point because it was one of the prettiest beaches on the island, so I often visited it on my days off from work, sometimes even going there to paint. A state park, there weren’t any hotels or commercial businesses out there, only a few private homes on land that had been purchased before the government had stepped in and declared the beach a national treasure, so the shoreline still had a pristine quality to it. There weren’t any tiki huts or trucks selling snow cones or renting Jet Skis or sun umbrellas, so tourists generally avoided the area.

Although who knew what that mile of white, palm tree–dotted sand looked like now? The closer I got to the shore, the more difficult the roads leading to it became to navigate. What was normally a fifteen-minute scooter ride took over an hour, because I kept having to back down a street once I’d started up it, due to fallen trees or power lines I couldn’t get by, even on a motorbike.

But one thing I did not encounter were any hostile predators, despite Ed’s predictions. In fact, I met the opposite. Thoughtful locals who lived in the area had already generously marked places where electric lines were down or hanging low, tying brightly colored bandannas or even plastic bags around the wires so anyone passing by wouldn’t run over or into them.

I saw plenty of people out with their own personal chain saws, getting to work on fallen trees before city crews even had a chance to assemble. I recognized many of them from the Mermaid. All of them waved and called out as I rode by, happy to see a familiar face.

“When are you guys opening back up?” a few wanted to know.

“Later this afternoon,” I called out.

This information was met with enormous smiles and cries of “Great, we’ll be there!”

Ed was going to get plenty of takers for the food he was hoping to give away before it spoiled.

My heart grew heavier the closer I got to the beach, however. I’d seen virtually no damage to any of the homes I’d passed traveling through town, aside from a few missing roof shingles or carports.

But the first home I saw upon turning down Sandy Point Drive—a beautiful, three-story modern structure that I happened to know belonged to a wealthy real estate developer who’d hosted several charity benefits catered by the Mermaid—had been ripped from its foundation by either the wind or storm surge or both. It lay several yards into the surf, collapsed onto itself.

It had the sad, vacant look of a home that had been deserted—I knew the owner was a “snowbird” who resided up north during the summer months—but I still offered up a silent prayer that no one had been in the house during the storm.

Beyond it the road was virtually unrecognizable as such, there was so much sand, seaweed, and other debris thrown across it. My tires skidded unsteadily on the uneven surface.

The house next door to the one that had collapsed had lost part of its roof. The back deck was completely missing from the next house, torn savagely away and tossed who-knows-where by the waves.

And then—boom!—there it was, right in front of me: the Atlantic Ocean. Normally, the sea around Little Bridge was an eye-achingly bright turquoise blue, with streaks of paler and darker blue within it.

Not today. Today, I could see that the storm had changed not only the ocean’s color—it was a dark, metallic gray-blue because of all the sand and sea grass that had been churned up from the bottom—but its surface as well. Instead of the smooth, almost glasslike body of water in which I could usually see the reflections of the puffy white clouds overhead, I found myself staring at raw, white-capped waves lapping at the hulls of overturned, half-sunken boats that had escaped their moorings, and pieces of floating jetty.

It would be impossible to navigate waters like this, not unless you were in a navy vessel. There were too many hidden underwater hazards that might damage or destroy a boat’s propellers or hull.

The sea wasn’t all that had been transformed by the storm. The landscape of the beach in front of me had been reshaped as well. The sand that had once been pure, powder white was now caked dark with seaweed and other flotsam, smashed stone crab traps and brightly colored fishing buoys. The gorgeous palm trees that had once loaned the beach such a tropical air had been completely stripped of their fronds by the high winds, and now resembled spindly toothpicks, pressing up out of the sand like misshapen candles on a mottled birthday cake.

The only consolation for the destruction that I could see was that the birds had returned in droves. There were seabirds everywhere, gulls, cormorants, herons, frigates, pelicans, and even osprey, picking through the debris on the beach for whatever tasty snacks they could find inside the rotting algae.

Halfway up the beach, however, was a piece of wreckage from the storm that the birds had no interest in: a large yacht, which had washed up and was resting on its side in the middle of the road, like a sixty-foot seal taking a quick nap in the baking sun.

The boat wasn’t the only thing on the road that shouldn’t have been there. I had to drive around a refrigerator, someone’s Jet Ski, a kid’s tricycle, and multiple pieces of deck furniture.

As I navigated my scooter closer to the address Mrs. Hartwell had given me as Drew’s—42 Sandy Point Drive—and around thicker and thicker piles of sand and seaweed, I tried taking deep breaths to control my wildly erratic thumping heart. He wouldn’t be here, I told myself. He couldn’t. He’d have found shelter somewhere else on the island—the high school, maybe. It wasn’t that far from here.

Because only a fool would have stayed on this side of the island. Sandy Point was all but destroyed, and any living thing that had remained here—where the eye of the storm had clearly passed over—would have been destroyed along with it.

Drew must have been able to see that, and had fled, along with his dogs, in advance of the worst of Marilyn’s winds.

And yet suddenly, there it was, looming up in front of me. Number 42, exactly as he’d described it: a single-story building of poured concrete, painted white, standing tall on forty-foot pilings, which kept the home atop them not only well out of the storm surge, but also steady against hurricane-force winds since the pilings were sunk deep into the sand.

Cement steps led up to a whitewashed deck that encircled the entire house, providing a 360-degree view of the island and beach. From my vantage point on the road, I could see that Drew had installed sliding glass doors to every room. He must have used impact-resistant glass, because none of these appeared to have been shattered.

Some of them, though, seemed to have been thrown open, possibly to let in the ocean breeze . . .

. . . unless they’d been sucked open by the hurricane-force winds. Long, filmy white curtains streamed out through the openings and fluttered in the strong ocean breeze.

There was no sign of Drew’s pickup truck, but when I switched off the scooter’s engine, I could hear—very faintly, over the rumble of the waves and the howl of the wind—the sound of dogs barking.

No. No way. Was I imagining this? I had to be.

Removing my helmet and setting it on the scooter’s seat, I picked my way across the seaweed-strewn beach, heading toward the house’s stairs, my heart hammering harder than ever. He couldn’t possibly be there, I told myself. Or if he was, I was going to find him dead. Probably the storm had sucked open those sliding doors, then hurled a piece of driftwood inside, knocking him in the head, killing him instantly.

And if that’s what had happened, how was I going to tell his aunt? I wondered as I began to climb the stairs, which were slippery from the muck and grime the storm surge had left behind. Drew being dead would break her heart.

The farther I climbed, the harder the wind from the sea whipped around me, and the louder and more insistent the barking seemed to become. Where was that barking even coming from? With the wind, it was hard to tell. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Then, just as I reached the top of the steps, the wind whipped my hair directly into my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing, but as I fought to scrape back the wayward strands, I heard a different sound. A man’s voice.

An all-too-familiar voice.

“Fresh Water!”