Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Goldberg, Lee (books for students to read .TXT) 📕

slowly sinking in and, with it, a certain resignation. We were caught up in something now that we had very little control over. All we could do was wait and see what happened next.

In a way, I was sort of thankful for the quiet. My ears were no longer ringing with accusations and lies.

“This is payback,” Sharona said softly.

“From who?”

“From God,” she said. “This is what I get for not believing Trevor. I’m being made to suffer the same way he is.”

“If we go to prison,” I said, “both of our kids are going to be orphans.”

“They are going to be screwed up for life,” Sharona said.

“Totally,” I said.

“They’ll have one bad relationship after another, searching for the stability they never had as children.”

“They’ll probably become alcoholics or drug addicts,” I said, “if they’re lucky.”

“I guess this means we’re both out of the running for the mother-of-the-year award,” she said.

“I was disqualified from consideration long before I was arrested for murder,” I said.

“Come to think of it,” Sharona said, “so was I.”

We were silent for a time. We were only joking, but not by much. We were both genuinely afraid that we’d failed our children.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?” Sharona said.

“For all the nasty things I thought about you and every selfish thing I did because I was worried about losing my job.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Sharona said.

“For what?”

“For leaving Adrian and forcing him to find a new assistant, ” Sharona said, “because if I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“I’d be in another one,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” she said. “But would there be a murder involved?”

“I guess you never heard about how I met Mr. Monk.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said.

“I caught a guy stealing a rock from my daughter’s fish tank,” I said. “He tried to kill me, but I killed him first. Captain Stottlemeyer brought Mr. Monk in to help figure out what was going on.”

“What was so special about this rock?”

“It was from the moon,” I said.

“You’ve been to the moon?”

“Not since Thursday,” I said.

“The firefighter?” she asked.

I nodded. “The thing is, there’s enough truth to the things Ludlow said about me, my life and the things I’ve done to make the untruths look truthful.”

“And the only reason for you to do what he’s charged you with doing is if I murdered Ellen Cole,” Sharona said, “which I didn’t do.”

“I know that,” I said.

“Just making sure,” she said. “The case against you is being used as a case against me.”

“And it’s all speculation,” I said. “There isn’t half as much evidence against you.”

“There’s no evidence against me,” she said. “If we can prove Ludlow wrong about Ronald Webster’s murder, then his case against me falls apart, too.”

“How are we going to do that?” I said. “Not even Mr. Monk could do it.”

“Adrian didn’t even try,” Sharona said. “He froze up.”

“After everything we’ve done for him,” I said, “how could he do that to us?”

“Because he doesn’t know,” Sharona said.

“He doesn’t know if we’re guilty?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t know who is.”

As tired as I was, I didn’t sleep much that night. I only had catnaps. During those periods of wakefulness, when I was cold and scared, I thought about everything that had happened and everything that was said.

I thought about Sharona’s comment that Monk froze because he didn’t know who the real killer was. It made a lot of sense. Not knowing who killed Trudy had frozen Monk for years. He was completely unable to function. Now the two people who were closest to him were in trouble, their freedom depending on the solutions to two murders that he couldn’t solve.

We’d be lucky if Monk didn’t go back to the way he was before Sharona saved him.

Or become catatonic.

It did make me wonder, though.

Who would save Monk this time?

And who would save us?

I’d drifted off again—I didn’t know for how long—and woke up suddenly in a panic, unsure where I was. It took me a moment to slip back into place. I was in jail, accused of a murder I didn’t commit. I wished I had a mysterious one-armed man I could claim was the real felon. Maybe I would anyway.

I was drifting off into sleep again, counting one-armed men instead of sheep, when Sharona spoke up.

“I love him, too,” she said.

“I didn’t say that I did,” I said.

“You didn’t have to,” she said.

We were silent for a time. I thought about what she’d said. “Then how could you leave him?” I asked.

“I got back together with Trevor,” she said.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “If Trevor wanted you so badly, he would have stayed with you in San Francisco. You can’t lay this on him. You decided to leave Mr. Monk.”

“Working for Adrian isn’t a job,” she said. “It becomes your life. It starts with him needing you, demanding all of your time and attention. And then, somewhere along the way, you discover that you need him almost as much as he needs you.”

She was right. Why else would I have become so fiercely protective of my job? I’d moved from job to job before. But this was more than that. I knew it, Sharona knew it and I bet even Julie knew it.

“All the more reason not to go,” I said.

“What if you fall in love with someone again?” she asked me. “What if you want to get married?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said.

“It will,” Sharona said. “And when it does, where is Adrian going to fit in to that?”

“I’d keep working for him,” I said.

“You couldn’t give Adrian the attention he needs,”