Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Goldberg, Lee (librera reader .TXT) 📕

my bikini. There’s no way he could have known whether Mitch had ever seen me in it. For all Swift knew, I bought it last week.”

“You still want to believe in him.”

“I want to understand how I was fooled.”

“These con men are very smart. They study up on fashion, songs, hairstyles, everything that is or was in vogue. He must have known the bathing suit was an older style, cut, or pattern and made a lucky guess.”

“But what if he’d been wrong?”

“He’d have said, ‘What Mitch is saying is that he still thinks you’re beautiful and will always love you.’”

I felt my eyes tearing up again and it pissed me off. Was I that weak? That vulnerable?

“You’d better go, Mr. Monk, or I may cry all night.”

“That’s okay,” Monk said. “I don’t mind as long as you’ve got plenty of tissue.”

We sat there without talking; the only sounds were my sniffles. I was aware, though, of the sting of the tears on my cheeks and the warmth of Monk’s hand in mine.

“But I do wonder about those Toblerone bars,” Monk said.

“You’d better go check.”

“Maybe I should.” Monk got up and paused at the open door to his room. “If I find two, would you like one of them?”

He wouldn’t be able to sleep with two pieces of the same candy in a minibar filled with one piece of everything else. Even so, it was a nice gesture.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.”

I ate the extra Toblerone and called home to talk with Julie and my mom. I left out everything about my day except the time I spent at the beach. Julie informed me I was boring. It sounded like Mom had already bought Julie enough clothes to last her until high school, so my daughter was in no hurry for me to get back.

I fell asleep within seconds of resting my head on the plump pillow. I was exhausted. I was jet-lagged. I was emotionally depleted. It was a deep, rejuvenating, dreamless sleep that ended at eight A.M. with the crowing from a chorus of roosters.

It was the last sound I expected to hear on a tropical island. Parrots, maybe. Or macaws. Not roosters. But I awoke totally refreshed.

I didn’t knock on Monk’s door to see if he was up. Instead, I slipped into a T-shirt and sweats and went down to the beach for a walk.

The sand had been smoothed by the surf during the night and was damp from the morning drizzle. The air was moist, warm, and heavy.

There were a half dozen others walking on the sand, but it still felt as if I had the beach to myself. I walked past the Grand Kiahuna Poipu bungalows, but couldn’t see over the hedges, even walking on my tippy-toes.

Farther up the beach, just above the surf line, an enormous seal and her pup were lying on the sand. A worker from the hotel was roping off a wide area around them with yellow caution tape. I stopped at the edge of the tape and looked at the seals.

The mother had a scarred brown coat; her pup’s was jet-black. They both had faces that reminded me of golden retriever puppies. The mother looked back at me with her marble eyes.

“Those are monks,” the hotel worker said. He was Polynesian, with a deeply tanned, deeply lined face.

“Monks?”

“Named for their solitary existence,” the worker said. “They are an endangered species.”

I nodded toward the mother. “What are those scars?”

The worker smiled slyly, showing all his crooked teeth. “From all her good lovin’. The male seals like it rough.”

I gave the monk seals, and the hotel worker, a wide berth and continued on my walk.

The beach ended at a rocky point of lava rocks that stretched out into the bay. A well-worn footpath wound around the base of the point and ended at the sidewalk on Hoonani Road, right in front of the Whaler’s Hideaway. As I walked past the condos, I glanced up at the woman’s unit, but the drapes were closed.

I crossed the street and went into the Whaler’s Hideaway parking lot, following it around to the management office. There were doughnuts on the counter and a middle-aged woman behind it. She had a beehive hairdo and a willingness to talk.

I learned she was semiretired and worked part-time to subsidize her island lifestyle, which she couldn’t manage to do with the money she’d saved as a schoolteacher. I learned her children and grandchildren never visited her when she lived in Flagstaff, but now that she had moved here, they wanted to see her all the time. And I learned the names of the “lovely couple” in condo A-3.

Roxanne Shaw and her boyfriend Curtis Potter. Both from Cleveland.

13

Mr. Monk Goes Golfing

When I emerged from the elevator on our floor, I saw three maids’ carts in front of the open door to Monk’s room. I went inside and found the maids folding bath towels on the bed, with Monk watching over them.

“No, no, Kawaiala, you fold it from left to right, and then from bottom to top. Try it again.” Monk moved to the next maid as she was folding. “Wait, Meilani, make sure the corners touch. If you get that first crucial fold wrong, abort the procedure and go again.”

“What are you doing, Mr. Monk?”

“Showing them how to properly fold a towel instead of rolling it.” One of the maids’ towels caught his eye. “Very good, Lana. You’re getting the hang of it. Let’s do it once more. Practice makes perfect.”

“I found out about the woman we saw last night,” I said. “Her name is—”

“Roxanne Shaw,” Monk interrupted.

“How did you know?”

“I saw her signature on the credit card receipt on the counter as we left the restaurant. She has a very nice, even signature, by the way.”

“Well, her name is not the big news. I found out that she’s from—”

“Cleveland,” Monk interrupted. “Just like Lance and Helen.”

“How did you know that?” I said, trying to hide the disappointment in my