Page 45 of No Judgements

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!”