Mr. Monk Gets on Board Read Online Free PDF Page B

cover and the horizontal row of ridges along the spine. The only difference was that this one was wet and in plastic, and the other was sitting proudly on its mahogany book stand.
    Malcolm seemed most intrigued by the find. “May I?” he asked, pulling a pair of linen gloves from his faux-leather messenger bag. Did the man always carry gloves? I certainly hadn’t noticed any last night at my place.
    With deft ease, Malcolm unzipped the plastic bag, extracted the water-damaged book, and laid it out on a second circular library table. He examined the binding and pried apart the soggy pages. He pulled a jeweler’s loupe from his bag for a closer inspection. Finally he looked up and turned to Monk. “It’s a very good fake.”
    “Of course it’s a fake,” said Monk. “I knew that when it was still covered in lilies.”
    “You knew a fake Shakespeare was in the pond?” asked a skeptical Devlin.
    “Eighty-six percent,” said Monk. “It’s the only thing that made sense.” Meanwhile, the captain and the lieutenant were staring at Malcolm. Staring hard.
    At this point, my mind was spinning. I finally meet a sexy, smart, single man and what now? I’m going to have to start visiting him in San Quentin?
    “I’ve never been in this house before yesterday,” protested Malcolm. “I’ve never seen this folio or met Miss Braun before.”
    “He’s innocent,” I told anyone who would listen.
    Monk shook his head and snorted. “Of course he is. The killer is Portia Braun.”
    His accusation took the rest of us by surprise, especially Portia Braun.
    “This is preposterous,” the woman sputtered in her light but distinct accent. “I demand an apology.” But no one cared.
    From here on everything moved quickly. The German curator was restrained, Jerry said “I knew it” a few too many times, and Monk settled in to explain.
    The stumbling block in this case, according to my partner, had always been motive. Lester Melrose had just changed his will. His son wouldn’t profit from killing him. The butler didn’t inherit. And Portia had just received an immense, unexpected gift. All she had to do was wait a day until Lester died of natural causes.
    But the fact that something had been thrown into the pond . . . That had prompted Monk to think in a new direction. What if the motive hadn’t been to take something valuable from the room but to return it? And that had led him to his eighty-six-percent theory.
    Portia had always had her eye on the prize. The first folio was a curator’s dream. It could be sold quickly and quietly with few questions asked. So, during her time in San Francisco, Portia had gone about the task of having a passable forgery made. After that, it would be a simple matter of substituting the fake for the original.
    By her last day on the job, Portia had done it and was ready to walk out the door with the six-million-dollar treasure tucked in her luggage, never to return. But then came the unexpected. She’d been too nice to old Lester. He had willed her the first folio. And that was the last thing she’d wanted. She tried to turn down the gift but it was no use.
    So here was her problem. When the old man died, any day now, the estate would go into probate, and another hired expert would be brought in and would discover the substitution. Portia’s only option was to put the original back on the book stand and wait until she legally inherited it.
    She had been in the process of sneaking it back that night, when Lester caught her in the library, red-handed, with two versions of his priceless book. That’s why she had to kill him. And that’s why Monk hadn’t been surprised to find a Shakespeare forgery lying at the bottom of a lily pond.
    Once or twice during this process, I glanced over to Malcolm. The antiquarian dealer seemed a little stunned, standing protectively over the original folio, while the rest of us continued with the nitty-gritty police work.
    As far as proof went, things were