The sun was sinking down toward the horizon as Adrian trudged abysmally on his own through New Orleans Square. He could no longer contain many of his internal alarms. He strode over to a hot dog cart along the river and began rearranging the condiments. "Hey, what do you think you're doing!" yelled the vendor.
"They're out of order and not lined up," Adrian informed him loudly. He them seized the vendor's tongs and began rolling his hot dogs around in their bin until they were lined up as well as he could get them. "Shoelace is untied," he hailed down a passing man and bent down to tie it for him.
"Lay off!" the man pushed him back. Adrian stumbled in a partial daze over to the Haunted Mansion's queue, where he drew his nail file and scraped away at a paint bubble on the sign. After three minutes of hard scraping, which drew a large crowd of incredulous onlookers, he stepped back to note that all this had done was devoid the sign of much paint. He would ordinarily have fixed it, but he noticed that one of the dirt mounds surrounding a nearby tree was uneven with the others. He drew from under his tuxedo a small hand vacuum, then stooped over the mound and started sucking up the excess dirt.
"Everything all right there, fella?" came a big cheery voice right in his ear. Adrian yelped in shock and leaped high in the air. "Please don't do that!" he chided the performer in a Mickey costume now behind him, clutching his heart in shock, "You guys could kill me coming up like that when I'm not ready!"
"You don't look too happy there, bud," "Mickey" said in a rough interpretation of the character's voice.
"Oh, I'm never happy, Mickey," Adrian stood up, "But I am more unhappy than usual; a bad man's going to get away with murder, and I'll probably never find the note my wife left for me here. If it's still here; I'm starting to think it got thrown out a long time ago."
"Aw, don't give up fella," Mickey patted him on the shoulder, causing the detective to flinch in discomfort at being touched by a person in a costume; he could just guess how many germs suits like this would accumulate over the course of a day. "You know, there always can be a happy ending if you just wait long enough."
"Maybe," Adrian shrugged, "It's too bad real life isn't like a movie, and I've never really had a lot of happy endings."
"Maybe an autograph'll cheer you up," Mickey waved the detective over to an area nearby where many people were lined up for autographs with the mouse. Mickey hunched over the table and wrote down his John Hancock on a spare sheet of paper. Adrian glanced hard at it once it had been handed to him. "The dot on the I here, it's all off center, I can't take this," he announced out loud, "Can I have another one?"
He could tell the performer was giving him a strange look underneath the costume. Nonetheless, he wrote out another autograph for the detective. Adrian examined this second with equal scrutiny. "There's something wrong with the k, it's not the proper height," he complained.
Mickey couldn't suppress an aggravated growl as he wrote out a third one. "Tell me I wrote that right, please," he almost dared the detective as he handed him his latest signature.
"You did, Mickey, but it's not centered on the paper," Adrian told him after a hard examination, "Maybe if I wrote it myself we could…"
This statement prodded the performer under the costume to shout out loud something that made the many mothers and children in line gasp in horror. "Oh, uh, oops," he said nervously as many of the people that had been waiting for autographs stepped back, "Sometimes we just have long days and the grind get to…hey, where's everybody going?"
"There he is," came Paul's voice from out of the crowd. Barry the guard was also with him. "Where have you been?" the former asked as they approached the detective, "We've been looking all over the park; your friend Kight set out an all-points bulletin."
"I kind of wanted to be alone, Paul," Adrian told him, "Here, several autographs from Mickey for the kids; they're too uneven for me."
"Next time please tell us before you run off like that," Barry scolded him, "If your life's in danger you can't just wander off. And what have you been doing around here; one guy came up to me and said you'd asked him to change his shirt because it wasn't colored-coordinated with the scenery."
"Oh, I usually get like that when I'm depressed, things just start flowing out more," Adrian told him with an innocent shrug.
"Well, everyone else is finishing off the rides in Fantasyland," Paul informed him, "That probably gives us about twenty minutes, so would the Riverboat not freak you out too much? And let me reassure you," he added when Adrian started to nod to this, "That it's on an underground rail; we can't tip over."
"Floatation devices?" Adrian had to know.
"Enough for five hundred people," Barry told him definitely, "And if it makes you feel better, I can see to it they're all tested first."
"Well, it guess it's fine by me then," Adrian shrugged.
"You sure you can see everything from back there?" Paul had to ask Adrian.
"Yeah, yeah, I can see it all like a painting, crystal clear," Adrian told him. He was standing along the starboard side wall of the riverboat's middle deck (he'd determined upon boarding that the lower deck was too close to the water for comfort and the upper deck was too high and too open-ended), as far away from the railing as he could get. He was uncomfortable with the large number of people that had chosen to also join them on the riverboat, but he was determined to minimize his crowd fears for the rest of the evening, if only to try and at least look somewhat normal. "How's it coming with them?" he called to Barry nearby, where the guard was trying to keep watch on him while simultaneously testing all the ship's floatation devices as agreed on.
"Great, they all seem to work," Barry said. The detective heard him mutter under his breath, "And I'll be eighty by the time I get through with all of them!"
"Nice and relaxing, though, isn't it?" Paul gave up on his railing seat to join Adrian against the wall, "Nothing takes your cares away like a nice smooth ride like this, right?"
"I wouldn't know, I've never been relaxed," Adrian admitted. He took a long, deep breath. It was time, he felt, to bring up something that he'd been carrying with him most of the day. "And while we're alone like this, Paul—sort of," he said slowly, taking not of the five dozen or so people around them, "You might as well tell me, how long have you been seeing that other woman?"
Paul jumped very high in the air. "Wh-Wh-What?" he said nervously.
"It's been going on for at least three months now, hasn't it," Adrian told him, "You haven't told her you're married, have you? You take your wedding ring off a lot outside; there's a very noticeable tan mark on your finger where the ring would normally be. What's her name?"
"Her name's Diane," Paul said very softly. Tears were filling his eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing," he said, "She joined the unemployment office three months ago like you said. I don't know, maybe ten years of tedium with Sandy took its toll. She was beautiful and I fell for her. We'd meet after office hours, but it was only for dinner; I have not made love to her, I swear!"
"I see," Adrian could see he was telling the truth about this, "Now my important question is, do you still love your wife, whom you vowed to love and honor till death do you part, even after this?"
"Detective, I love Sandy with every ounce of my being!" Paul told him with an edge of sad hysteria, "I have never stopped loving her through this whole thing, and I don't want to see her get hurt by this in any way! For the last few weeks I've been unable to sleep at night, worrying about how she'd take it if she found out! It would break her heart. It would break the kids' hearts."
Adrian, despite his normal extreme disdain of adultery, felt sorry for the man before him. "Well, Paul, you want out of the affair, then?" he had to know.
"More than life itself right now," Paul sniffed, "But there's no way I can do it with them finding out and being hurt!"
"Well, if there's one thing I have found over the years, it's that the truth tends to hurt a little less," Adrian couldn't help putting an arm around him, "I think if you told Sandy that much, things wouldn't be as bad. Trust me on that."
He glanced down at his own wedding ring. "You don't have to worry," he said softly, as if expecting Trudy to be standing by listening to his every word, "I would never consider it, not even for a minute. You're always mine."
"Who're you talking to?" Paul gave him a strange look.
Before Adrian could answer, something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. "What's that?" he asked out loud, daring to rush over to the railing. Darkness was falling quickly, but something could be seen floating in a small inlet of Tom Sawyer Island by the riverboat's night-lights. "Hello, I think we've got it!" he announced out loud. Without warning, he ran down the stairs to the lower deck and pushed his way through the crowds gathered along the railing there. He reached as far out with his claw as he could, but was still unable to reach the object, which was now clearly an overturned briefcase and wet papers.
"What's going on now?" Barry, still testing the floatation devices, came up behind him.
"Get on the horn, call Kight and Disney," Adrian told him, "I think we just found our missing financial records."
"I was worried sick about you," Natalie informed the detective about ten minutes later as they stood on the dock watching Kight and a special security team row out to the site on one of the Explorer Canoes.
"Well, everyone was in a bad mood and all, no point burdening them," Adrian shrugged.
"I'm really amazed you didn't kill anyone out there on your own, yourself included," Natalie continued, "You did better today than I thought, Mr. Monk."
"It was close a couple of times," Adrian admitted, "I have my moments. Like right now; this post's crooked."
He kicked at a dock piling with his foot, trying to get it straighter. There was a bump as the canoe returned to the dock. "The ink's drained a bit, but these are definitely financial documents," Kight announced, stepping out onto dry land, "We're going to take them down to the recovery room and see if we can dry them out enough to read exactly what they say and if we've got any of Chalmers's fingerprints."
"And then we've got to get back over to the sub lagoon," one of the security personnel spoke up, "Haven't been able to do any of the underwater work we wanted to all day."
"Underwater work?" Adrian abruptly made several obtuse hand gestures. A broad smile crossed him face. "You got it?" Natalie asked him.
"I got it," he told her, "I know how he made Faulk fly. We've just got to find…wait a minute, what's this one?"
He took hold of one of the soggy papers in the briefcase and examined it from several angles. "This looks just like the outside of the Treasure Planet building," he mused, "And this looks like a…"
A worried look crossed his face. "Chalmers's aim's more than just destroying financial records," he told everyone, "He wants the whole company. We can't let that ride opening ceremony go on."
"It starts in five minutes," Kight glanced at his watch, "Why?"
"Call Mr. Disney," Adrian started threading his way through the crowds back toward the Hub, "I'll explain on the way."