Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse Read Free Page A

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