Page 63 of No Judgements

“Well, I can’t leave them here,” I said defensively. “There’s no power. It must be ninety degrees in here. It stinks, and it’s filthy.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you, ergo the beer. But...”

I glared at him. “Listen, if you don’t like it, you can leave. I’m sure there must be more important things for you to be doing right now. Aren’t you supposed to be a carpenter? Shouldn’t you be out making emergency repairs on someone’s house?”

“Probably,” he said, a slow grin beginning to creep across his handsome face. “Too bad there’s no cell service, so no one can reach me.”

“Fine. Well, if you want I can drop you back at yourhouse first, before I go to your aunt’s, so you won’t have to face her if you’re so afraid of what you think she’s going to say if I show up there with two so-called rats.”

“Oh, no.” The grin broadened. “I’m sticking around so I can watch how the rest of this plays out. You’re not getting rid of me that easy, Fresh Water.”

And the weird thing was that even though his words should have annoyed me, I sort of liked hearing them.

That’s when I should have realized the true extent of the hurricane’s damage.

Chapter Twenty-Three

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 outdoorpen, 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 theLittle 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.”