Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Goldberg, Lee (best large ebook reader .txt) 📗

“Your husband misses you.”

I opened my eyes to see Dylan Swift, the psychic, slide onto the stool beside me. He didn’t bother introducing himself. I guess when your face is on a million books, and you’ve got your own TV show, you figure everybody knows you. Judging by the way everybody around the pool was staring at us, he was probably right.

“I’m single,” I said, giving him the information his lame pickup line was designed to draw out of me. I’m not famous, but I didn’t bother introducing myself, either. He could wait for my book, assuming I ever wrote one.

“You’re a widow,” Swift said, his gaze intense and piercing, like a surgical laser. It felt like my vision was improving just looking into his eyes. “And the bonds between you and your husband haven’t been severed by death.”

I was angry at the invasion of my privacy and pained by the truth of his observation, but I tried not to reveal either emotion.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I reached casually for my drink and nearly knocked it over.

“He’s anxious to communicate with you, to ease your pain,” Swift said. “But I sense it’s not your mourning that he wishes to relieve. No, it’s something else. Some unfinished business. You feel that he was wronged in some way.”

“Mitch was killed two days before his twenty-seventh birthday,” I said. “I’d say that was wrong.”

I was surprised at how close to the surface my anger was and how easily I revealed it. I guess when it came to Mitch, my emotions were pretty raw.

Swift took the umbrella from my drink and twirled it between his fingers. “It was an accident that took him from you.”

“He was shot out of the sky by enemy fire,” I said. “It was hardly an accident.”

“What I meant was that it wasn’t his fault,” Swift said. “He doesn’t blame himself for what happened in Kosovo and neither should you.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“But somebody does, and that troubles you,” Swift said. “It fills you with rage and frustration. No matter what anyone in the military tells you, Mitch wants you to know he did everything a soldier should do. He wants you to be proud of him, to know that he was courageous, and not to doubt that he was the man you loved, right up until the end.”

Against my will, tears were welling in my eyes, and that really pissed me off. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of this man. Or any man.

“I’m still not impressed,” I said, taking another sip of my Lava Flow and trying to act as if we were discussing something like baseball or the weather instead of the death of my husband.

“I’m not trying to impress you or anybody else,” Swift said. “I’m just relaying a message. You want to know what really happened to Mitch, don’t you?”

“Can you tell me?” I asked, upset at how quickly I spoke and the desperation that revealed.

“I can’t, but Mitch can,” Swift said. “Unfortunately, the images, the symbols, they aren’t so easy to read. Other voices and other sensations are crowding them out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My relationship with the spirit world is complicated. Imagine a thousand spirits in a room and just one cell phone for them to call out with. I am the cell phone. They are all fighting to be heard. But you know how unreliable cell phone reception is sometimes. It would be hard enough just hearing them clearly, but they don’t speak to me in words so much as in feelings, images, tastes, smells, and sounds.”

“Tell the others to wait their turn,” I said. “Let Mitch talk.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Swift said. “And like a cell phone, I can’t control who uses me. Sometimes, when I am near someone, a spirit who wants to reach that person will come through very forcefully. In other cases people come to me and ask to reach a specific loved one who has crossed over to the great beyond. That’s more difficult.”

“You have to make the cell phone ring on the other side and you hope the right spirit answers it.”

Swift smiled enigmatically. I had a feeling he worked hard perfecting the enigmatic part. “Something like that.”

“You haven’t told me anything about my husband that you couldn’t have found in a Google search or safely assumed based on the circumstances.”

“You’re a skeptic.”

“I’m a realist,” I said. I was lying. I wanted more than anything to believe he was talking to Mitch, and I hated myself for that yearning. “What do you want from me, Mr. Swift?”

“Call me Dylan, please.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Natalie.”

“So you do know who I am,” I said accusingly.

“I know you were with Adrian Monk, and I need to see him,” Swift said.

“Why?”

“To relay a message from the dead. Someone is desperate to communicate with him.”

“Anyone in particular?” I asked.

“Helen Gruber,” he said.

“That’s pretty specific, considering the spirits rarely introduce themselves to you.”

Swift smiled again, though there was nothing enigmatic about it this time. He was pleased.

“You’ve watched my show?”

“When I was stuck at home with the flu. I caught a few minutes here and there between my vomiting.”

I was trying to be cutting, to dispel some of that smug confidence of his, but he seemed unperturbed.

“I’ve never felt such a strong connection to a spirit before. My bungalow is a few doors down from hers,” Swift said. “It was as if her spirit contacted me on her way to the other side, moments after she was killed.”

“How do you know she was killed?”

“I felt it. It was sudden. It…” He struggled for the right words. “It didn’t come from inside, like a natural death. It came from behind. Someone came up behind her and struck her on the head; that’s what I’m sensing.”

He could have picked up most of the vague stuff he’d told me so far from the hotel staff or one of the police