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

The Little Bridge Aqueduct Authority reports pressure is increasing down its main transmission line as crews continue to shut off leaks. Anyone who sees water coming out of broken lines should contact the LBAA.

Drew!”

Aunt Lu’s scream upon seeing her nephew enter her home was almost as loud as the howls of Hurricane Marilyn had been, but significantly more joyful.

As the older woman threw her arms around his neck, I could see that she had tears in her eyes.

And they were not, as Drew had tried to tease me, tears at the fact that I was bringing “rats” into her home, but of happiness because I’d returned her beloved nephew to her.

Leaving the family to their tender reunion—through which I could hear Drew saying, over and over again, “Come on, now, Lu, everything is fine”—I headed to my room in the library to check on Gary . . .

Only to find him—and all my other stuff—gone.

“Um.” I didn’t want to interrupt such an intimate moment with questions about the whereabouts of my cat, let alone my clothing, but my heart had begun to beat practically out of my chest, particularly about Gary. According to the people at the animal shelter, it can take a cat days to get to know the inside of a new home well enough to feel comfortable in it, weeks not to get lost in a new neighborhood (the shelter preferred that new owners not allow their cats out of the house at all). If someone had let Gary outside, I might never see him again. “Does anyone know where Gary is?”

“Oh.” Aunt Lu was drying her eyes on the edge of a dish towel. “He got so lonely in there while you were gone. We could hear him crying.”

This was not boding well. I had to fight to keep my tone even. “So . . . ?”

“So Nevaeh and Katie took him upstairs with them. They’re playing with him in Nevaeh’s room.”

“Oh.” Relief washed over me. “Thanks.”

While this didn’t exactly explain where the rest of my stuff had disappeared to, it didn’t particularly surprise me. It sounded, in fact, like typical Gary behavior. After his lonely days in the animal shelter, he loved being the center of attention, and whenever he wasn’t, he did whatever he had to in order to ensure that he was. This generally consisted of persistent—but cute—mewing.

I popped into the laundry room to get the guinea pigs settled. The rabbits had been moved back to their outdoor pen, so it was simple enough to put Sonny’s pets into the cage the rabbits had been using, swapping out the rabbit food for guinea pig food. I made some bedding for the guinea pigs out of torn newspaper (the Hartwells had piles and piles of the Little Bridge Gazette, since there’d been no recycling pickup due to the evacuation order). Then I hurried upstairs to see what was up with Gary.

I hadn’t been to the second floor of the Hartwell home before, but it was like the first, heavily wainscoted and wallpapered. Only here, the ceiling in the hallway at the top of the stairs had been painted by a nineteenth-century muralist: a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds floating by. Here and there cherubic angels peeked out from behind the clouds, and bluebirds darted, ribbons streaming from their beaks. With the sun pouring in from the French doors along the second-floor terrace, it looked, quite literally, like heaven.

And in the room of the girl whose name was heaven spelled backward, I found my cat purring in a sunny spot on the canopy bed, a tiny doll tiara on his head.

“Oh, Bree,” Nevaeh said, when she noticed me in the partially opened doorway. “Isn’t Gary the cutest? He’s been such a good boy.”

Katie had her cell phone out and was taking photos of my cat from different angles. “We’re totally going to make your cat a social media star,” she informed me. “After the Internet comes back on.”

“Like Grumpy Cat,” Nevaeh said. “Only Gary’s not grumpy. He’s a little prince. Aren’t you, baby?”

Gary, in his absolute element, let out a little meow at me, as if both questioning where I’d been and asking why I’d been so slack in making him the social media star that he so clearly was.

“That’s great,” I said, because it was. “If anyone deserves to be an Internet sensation, it’s Gary. Nevaeh, I just thought I’d let you know that your uncle Drew got through the storm just fine. He’s downstairs if you want to say hi to him.”

“Oh, good.” Nevaeh was completely absorbed with looking through her drawers for Gary’s next costume. “I’ll come down and tell him hi in a minute. I knew he was going to be fine. I don’t know why everyone was so worried. He spent, like, ages storm-proofing that house.”

“Um,” I said. “Okay.”

I was reminded of my own teenage years, when family drama had seemed much less important than the dramas going on within my circle of friends.

“You know Uncle Ed wants us to go over to the café in a little bit to start serving food to all the people who don’t have power or didn’t stock up, or whatever,” she went on. “He’s over there now, getting stuff ready.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, there are some guinea pigs downstairs that I brought over from a friend’s house. They need a little TLC and probably a bath. They nearly drowned in the flooding from Marilyn. So maybe you guys could help me—”

“What?” Katie nearly dropped her phone. “Guinea pigs?”

“Oh my God.” Nevaeh’s eyes widened. “I love guinea pigs!”

I thought the two girls were going to bowl me over in their haste to get down the stairs to see Sonny’s pets. Though suddenly abandoned, Gary didn’t appear particularly upset. He only bent his head toward a paw that appeared to need licking, his tiara sliding off as he began grooming.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, and—removing the tiara and then cradling him in my arms the way Drew had done—I followed the girls downstairs. “You’ll always be a star to me, big boy.”

Gary purred happily, still enjoying his newfound fame.

Mrs. Hartwell was waiting for me in the library, looking nervous.

“Oh, Bree,” she said, twisting her hands as I went to deposit Gary back on the inflatable mattress where he belonged.

Except that I’d forgotten. The air mattress was gone. So was all the bedding I’d used the night before. Of course my things were gone, including Gary’s litter box. Was it in Nevaeh’s room? I hadn’t thought to look.

What was going on? Now that the storm was over, did Mrs. Hartwell expect me to go back to my apartment? That made perfect sense, of course, except . . . well, there was no power there, and when I’d opened the door to take a quick look inside to survey the damage, the place had reeked of damp.

I didn’t mind going back, of course, but . . .

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank you enough for bringing Drew home to me,” Mrs. Hartwell was saying.

“Oh, you’re welcome, Mrs. Har—Lucy.” I smiled at her as Gary made a beeline for his favorite chair, the pink-silk-cushioned love seat. Mrs. Hartwell, however, didn’t seem to care. “It was nothing, though, really. And Ed’s the one who donated the gas. Could I just ask you quickly what happened to the stuff I had in here? It’s no problem except that Gary’s litter box—”

“Oh, I wanted to talk to you about that, Bree.”

Wait. What? This did not sound good. Had I done something wrong? From the anxious look on her face, it appeared as if I had . . .

“Bree, this morning, while you were gone, the sheriff stopped by—”

“The sheriff?”

What on earth could the sheriff have wanted with me? I hadn’t disobeyed any laws.

Well, except for breaking into my landlady’s house. But that had been in order to rescue her son’s guinea pigs! And I’m sure she’d have wanted me to do that.

And I hadn’t done it alone. I had had a partner in crime.

“Where’s your nephew?” I asked quickly.

“Drew? Oh, he’s out back, looking at the pool. It really is going to need a lot of work if we’re ever going to get it back to the way it was. But we’re so fortunate that’s really the only damage we suffered. So many have it so much worse.”

“Sure. Well, listen, if it’s about the guinea pigs, Drew can help explain. See, he saw Sean Petrovich driving out of town last night. And Sean said he’d take care of them. But then Sean evacuated at the last minute with his girlfriend. So what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave them to die. They’re living creatures, just like the rest of us.”

Mrs. Hartwell stared at me, looking bemused. “Honey, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t?” I was confused. “But you said the sheriff—?”

“Oh, yes. Sheriff Hartwell stopped by this morning because he says he’s been receiving emergency calls all day on his satellite phone from the governor. Apparently, you’re a very important young lady. Bree, why didn’t you tell us that your mother is Judge Justine from the radio?”