For a second, I was worried I really had been fired—Ed was as well known for his fiery temper as he was for his ability to bake a truly outstanding key lime pie—but a glance at Angela’s and Nevaeh’s faces showed me this wasn’t the case. Instead of looking at me, everyone’s attention was glued to both of the television sets that hung from the ceiling, one at each end of the breakfast counter. Ed kept one tuned to Fox News, and the other to CNN, both with the sound off and closed captioning on. This seemed to keep all customers happy.
But today, out of deference to the storm, both televisions were tuned to the Weather Channel, with the sound up.
That’s how I was able to hear the meteorologists announce that Hurricane Marilyn was making a turn, and now appeared to be heading straight for Little Bridge Island.
Chapter Three
The high winds of a hurricane sweeping across the ocean can produce a dangerous storm surge, a wall of water that can cause massive flooding even hundreds of miles inland.
Some people like to say that Little Bridge Island was discovered by the Spanish in 1513, but of course that isn’t true. You can’t “discover” something that’s already been occupied for thousands of years before you ever even got there. Little Bridge, a small island in a chain of similar islands off the coast of the tip of Florida known as the Florida Keys, was home to the Tequesta Indians for many centuries before the Spanish invaded it. The Indians were enslaved, and eventually the Keys were turned into U.S. territory.
Little Bridge got its name due to the fact that it’s connected to the rest of the Keys by a bridge.
But since most of the Keys are connected to one another by bridges, it makes no sense that Little Bridge is named after the fact that it has a bridge.
But that’s part of its quirky appeal, and probably what drew my father to it when he was a young man and began planning our family vacations. He liked quirky places, and Little Bridge, with its odd name and even odder residents, is one of the quirkiest.
So Little Bridge was where we vacationed every year, even though my mother was pretty vocal about the fact that she’d have preferred to go somewhere more cosmopolitan, such as the Hamptons, Paris, or Ibiza.
But like my father, I grew to love our vacation house on the canal, waking to the smell of the salt water, finding manatees drinking from the hose of our dock, watching egrets pluck their delicate way through the sand. I loved boating, the rush of wind through my hair, the glassy stillness of the water near the sandbars, the challenge of painting that water, making it look as mirrorlike and gleaming on my canvas as it did in real life.
And of course walking through the quaint, sun-drenched town, the historic buildings—by law none were allowed to be more than two stories tall, because anything higher might impede a neighbor’s view of the sunset—each painted a different shade of pink or blue or yellow, stopping for ice cream or groceries at the locally owned shops. I could see why my father loved Little Bridge, why he would have moved there if his job as a successful defense attorney in Manhattan—and my mother’s dislike of the town—hadn’t made such a dream impossible.
I loved it, too. I felt safe in Little Bridge—not that, back then, I had any reason to feel unsafe anywhere.
It made perfect sense to me that it was to Little Bridge that I fled when my safety felt threatened. My father—if he hadn’t passed away last year—would have understood.
But now the new comfortable, safe life I’d put so carefully together seemed to be crumbling. I knew it the minute I walked into my apartment after I got off work and found my roommate, Daniella, throwing clothes into a suitcase.
“Where are you going?” I asked, though I had a sinking feeling I already knew. “You’re not evacuating, are you?”
“Sure am.” She took a slurp from the frozen margarita she’d poured herself. I’d seen the pitcher from the blender sitting on the kitchen counter as I’d walked into the two-bedroom apartment we shared.
The place was tiny—each of the bedrooms hardly large enough to fit a queen-size bed—but I considered myself lucky to have found it . . . not the place so much as the person who’d come with it.
A curvaceous, good-humored ER nurse, Daniella was outgoing and bubbly—exactly the kind of person I needed to be around after what I’d gone through this past year back in New York, just like the job at the Mermaid was exactly the kind of job I needed now. I was up and out the door by five thirty every morning, even on my days off, since Gary was used to being fed that early and woke me like clockwork daily at dawn.
This worked out well since Daniella was a morning person, too—not to mention extremely social. She seemed to be friends with nearly everyone on the island, which wasn’t surprising: at some point, she’d either given a stitch, shot, X-ray, or bandage to nearly all of them.
That’s how she’d snagged her two-bedroom rental for such a (comparatively) low rate: because she’d treated the landlady’s son for chronic asthma. Two-bedroom apartments were rare on Little Bridge—at least ones that were affordable to locals, since most living spaces on the island proper had been snatched up by vacation rental companies and were hawked at astronomical prices online to tourists.
But since our landlady, Lydia, like most people, adored Daniella, she rented to her at a discount.
“Mandatory evac for all city employees,” Dani was explaining to me, with her usual infallible cheer. “That includes the hospital. I’ve been reassigned to beautiful, sunny, downtown Coral Gables.”
“Coral Gables?” I lifted Gary, who’d rushed over to give me his customary greeting (sprawling supine at my feet, then rubbing his face all over my shoes), and took a seat. “That makes no sense. Why would they send you to Coral Gables when the hurricane is supposed to be headed here?”
“You’re asking for local bureaucracy to make sense?” Daniella let out a delighted laugh. Dani found everything delightful, even medical emergencies. She loved making sick people feel better. “You should know better than that by now, Bree!” Then she sobered and said, “No, but really, it’s because they don’t want people thinking it’s safe to stay here. If they know hospital and emergency services will still be staffed and up and running, no one will leave, because they’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. So all of us—ER staff, police, the firehouse—have been assigned to work at hurricane shelters out of the direct path of the eye. They hope that by doing this, the good citizens of this fine isle will follow. They’re sending us all out on buses later this afternoon. Which is why I’m drinking this.” She wagged her margarita at me. “I don’t have to drive.”
I stared glumly at the sunlight streaming in through her bedroom window. Given the blue sky and steamy temperature outside, it was hard to believe any sort of storm was on its way.
But the Weather Channel, blaring in the other room, was telling a different story, as were the dozens of text messages piling up on my phone, many from Caleb. And my mother.
“What’s bugging you?” Dani asked. “You’re not upset about this hurricane, are you? Chances are it will lose a ton of steam over Cuba, you know. It’s a terrible thing to say, and poor Cuba, but that’s usually what happens. We’ll just get a lot of wind and rain. But they have to evacuate us anyway, you know, just in case.”