Page 60 of No Judgements

I blinked at him. I knew what he meant—more than a few of my dad’s clients had been burglars, and they’d given me lessons in lock picking while my unsuspecting father was otherwise occupied. So I knew a dead bolt with side panels was bad news.

But I wasn’t sure how it would keep out someone with a chain saw. “What does that even mean?”

“That means we should go back to my aunt and uncle’s place and use their landline to call your friend and ask her if she’s got a spare key hidden around here somewhere, because otherwise we’re never getting through this door. I can’t even get through a window with the kind of shutters she uses. They’re all bolted into the ground, and I didn’t bring a drill.”

“Drew, we don’t have time,” I said instead. “Can’t you seethat water line? The tidal surge got in there. Sonny keeps his guinea pigs in a wire cage on the floor. Those animals could be dying as we speak!”

“I’m pretty sure guinea pigs can swim, Bree. And the water’s gone now.”

“Sure, but the poor little things are probably suffering from shock or hypothermia or both—”

“They don’t have hypothermia. The water was eighty-six degrees. That’s how the storm got so strong. You see, the two ingredients you need to fuel a hurricane are warm waters and wind—”

“Um, if I might interrupt.” Patrick approached us, Donna Martin—his silver pug—in his arms, and mercifully cut Drew off before he could explain to me how hurricanes form, a fact I already knew, having had the Weather Channel on twenty-four-seven before the power went out. “All of the bathrooms in this unit were built with jalousie windows.”

I had no idea what Patrick was talking about, but from the way his dark eyebrows lifted, Drew appeared interested. “Really?”

“Oh, yes.” Seeing my puzzled expression, Patrick explained, “That window in your bathroom with the louvered panes?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Oh. Yeah. What’s up with that?”

I hated that window. The individual glass slats were ancient and discolored and hardly let in enough light for me to see by when I was putting on my makeup. Worse, because the fittings were so old, the panes were loose, andso allowed steamy tropical air to flow into the bathroom instead of keeping it out.

Drew said, “It’s called a jalousie.” To Patrick, he said, “What about it?”

“Well, since those windows are so small and in the back of the building,” Patrick said, “and therefore more protected from the winds, Lydia never bothered to have shutters made for them.”

Drew looked even more interested. “So they aren’t boarded up? Are they big enough for a person to crawl through?”

“Oh, certainly.” Bill hurried over, Brenda and Brandon Walsh trotting at his heels. “I squeezed through ours once when Patrick lost our keys over at the tea dance by the dock—”

“You’re the one who lost the keys, Bill.”

“Um, no, I distinctly recall that it was you, Pat. Remember, you were the one who insisted on wearing that smoking jacket with the hole in the—”

“Sweetheart, that was you.”

Drew reached out and grabbed my wrist. “Come on.”

The next thing I knew, we were rounding the side of the building and picking our way past multiple recycling bins and trash cans—the lids of which had been carefully strapped down with tape by Sonny to keep them from blowing away in the storm—and locked-up bicycles, until we reached a small louvered window in the middle of the stucco wall.

“Bingo,” Drew said, and bent to retrieve a screwdriver from his tool kit.

“What are you going to do?”

“This is why jalousies fell out of fashion,” Drew said, using the screwdriver to bend one of the metal brackets holding the lowest louver in place. “They’re fine on porches and breezeways, but for windows to home interiors, not only are they energy inefficient, but”—he popped the second bracket, and the panel of glass fell noiselessly into his hand—“they can also be a security nightmare.”

I swallowed as he handed the heavy glass pane to me, then went to work on the next louver. “You mean... this whole time, somebody could have broken into my bathroom window just by removing the louvers?”

He threw me an amused glance. “Well, yes. It’s not very common, but it happens. But I thought you didn’t believe in Mean World Syndrome.”

I blinked at him as he handed me another glass pane. “What?”

“Isn’t that what you told me the other night? That the world is not this dangerous and unforgiving place that people like your mother are always trying to convince everyone that it is.”

I frowned. “Oh, that. Right. But a little common sense—like not having windows that are super easy to break into—never hurt anybody.”

He grinned as he turned back to his work. “True. Well, if you want, I could talk to your landlady when she gets back. There’s a company that makes new, energy-efficient jalousies that also lock in place. That way the building wouldn’t lose its historic charm, and you’d feel more secure.”