Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

Julie finished her homework and went to her room to IM her friends. I put away everything, expecting Monk to join me at any moment to lecture me on the proper arrangement of pots and pans or something, but he didn’t show.

The phone rang. It was Joe.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk when you came by,” Joe said. “And then you went across the street and didn’t come back. I kept waiting for you to come back.”

“Oh,” I said. Brilliant answer, huh?

There was an awkward silence, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since high school.

“You missed all the excitement,” Joe said. “A bunch of people from the city engineer’s office and the Public Utilities department were here. Turns out Dumas has a tunnel under his house to the sewer and another one from the sewer into our basement.”

“I know; Mr. Monk was the one who figured it out,” I said. “Dumas has been digging up Roderick Turlock’s treasure of stolen gold coins.”

“Did he kill Sparky?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Mr. Monk is still working on that one.”

“What about the mystery of your disappearing panties? Are you having any luck with that one?”

I almost said he could help me solve that mystery himself, but caught myself in time. Instead I said, “I’m really looking forward to seeing you Wednesday night.”

I supposed that could have been interpreted as conveying almost the same thought as what I didn’t say, but not so brazenly.

I don’t know how he interpreted it, because suddenly I heard the fire alarm bell go off at the station.

“Me, too, Natalie. I’ve got to run,” Joe said.

“Be careful,” I said, and we hung up.

My heart was racing, but for a whole lot of different reasons. One, I was excited. Two, I was nervous. And three, I was terrified, and not about our date. It was that alarm. It meant Joe was going to be rushing off to some fire. I knew that was what he did for a living—he was Firefighter Joe, after all—but the thought of him charging into some inferno made me queasy. I hadn’t felt that kind of queasiness since Mitch used to go off on his tours of duty. I felt it every time until the one mission when he didn’t return.

I went down the hall on my way to my room and walked past the open door of the guest room. I saw Monk lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded across his chest as if he were resting in a coffin.

I went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay, Mr. Monk?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” he said.

“For what?”

“The facts to fall into place.”

“Is that what they do?”

“Generally,” he said, sighing.

“And you just wait.”

He sat up and leaned back against the head-board. “What’s frustrating about these murders is how simple they are. We know how they were done and we even know who did them. The challenge is finding evidence where none appears to exist.”

“You’ve had bigger challenges than this before,” I said. “You’ll figure it out.”

“This is different,” Monk said. “I usually have a lot more space to think.”

“Space?”

“I start and end my day in an empty house. There aren’t any people or distractions. Everything is in its place. Everything is in order. All that’s left is just me and my thoughts, and sometimes my LEGOs. And that’s when the facts of a case fall naturally into place, and the ones that don’t point me to the solution of the mystery.”

“And that’s not happening now,” I said.

“I’m still waiting.”

In other words, our messy house and our messier lives were too much for him. He longed for the peace, solitude, and sterility of his house. He was homesick. And my house was about as unlike his as it was possible to get.

“Would you like me to find you a hotel room, Mr. Monk?” I tried to make the offer as nicely as possible, so he wouldn’t think I was angry or offended, which I wasn’t.

“No, of course not,” he said. “This is great.”

At first I thought he was being dishonest, but then I wondered if, compared to the alternatives, staying with us really wasn’t so bad.

A hotel could be even worse. Maybe he’d hear the TV next door, or a couple making love upstairs, or kids playing in the room below. Even if he didn’t hear anything, maybe just knowing so many people were in the building would be enough to distract him. Or, worse, what if he couldn’t stop thinking of the hundreds of people who’d stayed in his room, slept in his bed, and used the bathroom? And if that wasn’t enough stuff to distract him, what about the horror of mismatched wallpaper?

Compared to all of that, our guest room must have felt like a padded cell—in a good way, if there is such a thing.

So what he was really talking about was me and Julie. We were the ones creating all the distraction.

I got up from the bed. “I’ll leave you alone to your thinking.”

“No, no, I’ll go with you,” he said, getting up.

“But what about all those facts that need to fall into place?”

“They’ll fall later,” Monk said. “The problem with having so much space is that I never get a chance to help someone with their homework.”

I smiled to myself. As afraid as he was of human contact, it was nice to know that even Adrian Monk still needed it.

14

Mr. Monk and the Rainy Day

When I got up at six on Tuesday, Monk was already showered, shaved, and dressed, and the bathroom tub was clean enough to perform surgery in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he spent the night in the bathroom just to make sure he got to it first. If so, it’s a good thing neither Julie nor I got up in the middle of the night to pee.

The three of us had Chex cereal for breakfast in our brand-new bowls and swapped sections of the Chronicle among ourselves. There was an article on a back page about a warehouse fire last night, and how the roof caved in and sent two firefighters to the hospital. My throat went dry. Could that have been the fire Joe was called to? What if he was one of the firefighters who was hurt?

It was seven thirty, too early to call the fire station, unless I wanted to wake everyone up. I’d call later. Or maybe it would be better, I thought, to call now.

I was yanked out of my worries by the sound of a car horn outside, signaling that Julie’s ride to school had arrived.

Julie shoved all her books into her backpack, grabbed her sack lunch, and was heading out the door when I stopped her.

“Don’t forget your raincoat,” I said, taking it off the coat tree by the door.

She hated wearing her raincoat. She would rather get soaked from head to toe. The thing is, just a year earlier she had needed that raincoat more than anything else on earth. It was what everyone was wearing, and