What gets me is that the same people who won’t set foot in a house where someone has died don’t think twice about living on a cliff in a landslide zone. Or in woods prone to wildfires. Or in a high-rise apartment constructed on a fault line. Or in a housing tract spread out on a floodplain. Or in a neighborhood adjacent to a toxic landfill.
They’ll ignore those risks for the view, the solitude, the cachet, a shorter commute, or a good deal.
Not me. I had no qualms about enjoying the decadent luxuries of the $5,000-a-night private, oceanfront bungalow where Helen Gruber met her fate.
To Monk’s credit, neither did he.
Of course, if you want to get technical about it, her body was in the Jacuzzi. I’d have no problem going in the hot tub, either, but I’d sit where I could keep my eye on the palm tree. Yes, I know Helen Gruber wasn’t actually hit by a falling coconut—she was clobbered with one in the kitchen by her killer (who I was still betting was her husband, despite his airtight alibi). Even so, there was no harm in playing it safe.
Monk claimed one of the guest rooms for himself, so I took the master bedroom, which had its own private marbled bath and another hot tub. I changed into my bikini and was on my way for a quick dip in our private lap pool, detecting be damned, when there was a knock at the door.
I was hoping it was room service—maybe we qualified for the “Welcome to Kauai” bottle of champagne despite the fact that we weren’t paying the going rate for the bungalow.
I opened the door to find Dylan Swift standing there. He wasn’t grinning this time.
“Hello, Natalie. Is Mr. Monk available?”
So much for these being private bungalows, I thought. “How did you know we were here?”
“I’m in the bungalow next door and I saw you move in. I really need to speak with Mr. Monk. The spirits won’t give me any peace until I relay their messages.”
“I relayed them.”
“There are more. Day and night, all I’m getting are images and sensations from Helen. She’s very adamant about getting her messages through to this world.”
“You’re wasting your time. He’s not going to believe you anyway, and I sure as hell don’t. I know how you got all that information about Mitch out of me, and I’m telling you now, it won’t happen again. I’m not falling for it.”
That was when Monk, back in his usual attire, emerged from his room. “Is this the guy who talks to dead people?”
“He’s the one,” I said.
Swift treated that as his grand introduction, and he strode in as if stepping onto a stage in front of an audience. He offered his hand to Monk.
“Dylan Swift. It’s pleasure to meet you.”
Monk didn’t shake his hand. “I don’t particularly like shaking hands, especially with crooks and con men.”
“Which am I?”
“Both,” Monk said.
“I’m not surprised that you doubt my gift, Mr. Monk. In fact, I welcome your skepticism.”
“You do?”
“You’re a detective; you work with facts. You have an analytical mind. Whether you believe what I tell you or not doesn’t matter to me. You’ll only consider information you believe is useful, and that’s all I ask.”
“What you say is true,” Monk said. “I often arrive at the truth by considering the lies first.”
Monk glanced at me, noticed I was in my bikini, and abruptly looked away. I went back to the bedroom to grab my bathrobe but I could still hear them talking.
“Did anything I told Natalie yesterday prove to be useful?” Swift asked.
“No,” Monk said.
“Maybe I’ll do better this time.”
Swift walked past Monk into the backyard. He seemed drawn to the hot tub. I put on my bathrobe and followed them out.
“In my experience, I’ve found that it helps me make a connection when people bring me personal items that belong to the deceased.”
“I’m sure it does,” Monk said. “It’s much easier to make educated guesses that way. Cuts down on the amount of effort you have to put into extracting information and making it look like revelations.”
“Rarely do I get the opportunity to stand at the very spot where the deceased passed on,” Swift said, ignoring Monk’s comments. “It’s like standing at the doorway to the other side.”
He closed his eyes, held his hands out, and began to shake. After a moment he opened his eyes, cocked his head, and did an about-face, returning to the house.
“Are you sure she died in the hot tub?” Swift said to Monk.
“I didn’t say where she died.”
“I’m sensing it was inside the house.”
“Why don’t you just ask Helen where it was?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Swift said.
“Of course not,” Monk said. “That kind of clarity and specificity wouldn’t leave you much wiggle room for bad guesses.”
“You are applying corporeal laws to the spiritual world. That’s like asking fish to breathe air instead of water. Our expectations and our physics simply don’t apply there. Everything about their world is different from ours, including how they communicate. They don’t need words to convey ideas.”
“How convenient for you,” I said.
“Actually, it’s very inconvenient and frustrating for me, Natalie, as well as the spirits. It’s not like reading a letter or trying to translate Chinese into English. It’s much more complex than that. Imagine standing on a freeway and trying to hear what people are saying in the passing cars. That’s what this is like. So they try to use images, sensations, and emotions to convey what they wish to express, but even that is inadequate to the task.”
“Sounds to me like a lot of excuses designed to allow you to be vague and inaccurate,” Monk said. “And avoid being accused of fraud.”
Swift went to the edge of the kitchen and waved his hands
