him, of course. For me.
When we got to my little Victorian row house, I let Monk get his own suitcases out of the car while I rushed inside for one last look around for things that might set him off. It’s not like he hadn’t visited my place before, but this was the first time he was staying there for more than an hour or two. Little things that he might have been able to summon the willpower to overlook before might become intolerable now.
Standing there in my open doorway, looking at my small living room, I realized my house was a Monk minefield. The decor is what I like to call thrift-shop chic, the furniture and lamps an eclectic mix of styles and eras. There is some Art Deco here and a little seventies chintz there, because I bought whatever happened to catch my eye and meet my meager budget. My approach to interior design was to have no approach at all.
In other words, my entire house, and my entire life, was the antithesis of Adrian Monk. There was nothing I could do to change that now. All I could do was open the door wide, welcome him in, and brace myself for the worst.
So that’s exactly what I did. He stepped in, surveyed the house as if for the first time, and smiled contentedly.
“We made the right decision,” he said. “This is much better than a hotel.”
It was the last thing I ever expected him to say. “Really? Why?”
“It feels lived-in,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t like things that were lived-in,” I said.
“There’s a difference between a hotel room that’s been continuously occupied by thousands of different people and a home that’s . . . ” His voice trailed off for a moment. And then he looked at me a little wistfully and said, “A home.”
I smiled. In his own way, that may have been the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying, Mr. Monk.”
I led him down the hall, past Julie’s closed door, which had a big, hand-drawn, yellow warning sign taped to it that said: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. STAY OUT. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Since it’s usually just the two of us in the house, the sign struck me as adolescent overkill. I had a sign like that taped to my door, too, when I was her age, but I had brothers to worry about. She had only me. Below that sign, Julie had also taped up a diamond-shaped DANGER! HAZARDOUS WASTE placard that she’d found somewhere.
Monk glanced at the placard, then at me. “That’s a joke, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s very humorous.” He tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding more like he was choking. “Do you confirm it periodically?”
“Confirm what?”
“That it’s a joke,” he said. “Children can be very mischievous, you know. When I was eight, I once went a whole day without washing my hands.”
“You’re lucky you survived.”
Monk sighed and nodded his head. “When you’re young, you think you’re immortal.”
I gestured to the room beside my daughter’s. “This is our guest room.”
Actually, until the night before it had been our junk room, where we stored all the clutter we couldn’t fit into the rest of the house. Now it was all temporarily jammed into my garage.
Monk took a few steps into the room and regarded the furnishings. There was a full-size bed, the first one Mitch and I ever bought, and the walls were decorated with some cheaply framed sketches of London, Paris, and Berlin landmarks that we bought from street-corner artists when we eloped to Europe. The dresser was a garage- sale find with one missing drawer knob, a flaw I hoped Monk wouldn’t notice but knew that he would. It was his astonishing powers of observation that made him such a great detective. He could probably tell by glancing at the sketch of Notre Dame if the artist was left- or right-handed, what he ate for lunch, and whether or not he smothered his elderly grandmother with a pillow.
Monk set his suitcases down at the foot of the bed. “It’s charming.”
“Really?”
This was working out much better than I’d hoped, though I noticed he was shielding his eyes from the dresser as if it were emitting a blinding glare.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It oozes charm.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, exactly, by “oozes,” someone rang the doorbell. I excused myself and went to see who was at the door.
There was a burly guy with a clipboard standing on my porch. Behind him I could see two men unloading a refrigerator from a moving truck in front of my house.
“Does Adrian Monk reside here?” the man asked. He smelled of Old Spice and Cutty Sark. I wasn’t sure which was more unsettling to me: the mingling of odors or the fact that I could identify them.
“No, I reside here,” I said. “Mr. Monk is just a guest.”
“Whatever,” he said, then turned and whistled to the guys on the street. “Start unloading the truck.”
“Whoa,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. “What are you unloading?”
“Your stuff,” he said, thrusting the clipboard and pen at me. “Sign here.”
I looked at the papers on the clipboard. It was a moving-company invoice listing all the furniture, dishware, bedding, and appliances they were transporting from Monk’s house to mine.
“It’s about time you got here,” I heard Monk say behind me. I turned to see him holding the door open for the two guys hauling in his refrigerator. “Be careful with that.”
“Hold it,” I shouted at the movers, and then I turned to Monk. “What is all this?”
“Just a few necessities.”
“There’s a big difference between staying with someone and moving in.”
“I know that,” he said.
“Then how do you explain this?” I pointed at his refrigerator.
“I have special dietary needs.”
“So you brought your own refrigerator and all the food that’s in it?”
“I didn’t want to be a bother,” he said.
I waved the clipboard at him.
“This is everything you own, Mr. Monk,” I said. “To accommodate all of your belongings, I’d have to move everything of mine out of the house.”
Monk gestured to the movers. “I’m sure they’d be glad to help. They’re professionals.”
I took a deep breath, shoved the clipboard into the burly man’s hands, and said to him, “You’re taking all of this back where you got it.”
“They can’t,” Monk said.
“Why not?”
“The building is tented by now,” Monk said. “And filled with poison.”
“Then you’ll just have to put it in storage, Mr. Monk, or leave it on the front lawn. Because it’s not going in this house.”
I stomped back inside, slammed the door, and left Monk to work things out with the movers.
It was only when I was standing in the middle of my living room, trying hard to control my anger, that I finally realized that I’d been home for fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen or heard my daughter. I went to her door and knocked.
“Julie?” I pressed my ear to her door. “Are you in there?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Stop putting your ear to my door.”
I stepped back guiltily, even though I knew she couldn’t have seen me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Mr. Monk is here,” I said.
“I know,” she replied.
“Is that why you’re hiding in your room?”
“I’m not hiding.”
“I thought you liked Mr. Monk.”
