Mr. Monk and The Three Pies - Plot

Plot

The town of Tewkesbury is holding their centennial fair. At the fair, Pat van Ranken enters a roll of tickets into a raffle contest, intent on winning a homemade cherry pie. However, the ticket number called out is not one of van Ranken's tickets. An elderly woman wins the pie. van Ranken follows her back to her car, and demands it. When she refuses, he smashes her head against the steering wheel and steals the car. While Captain Stottlemeyer dismisses the homicide as a carjacking gone very, very wrong, Adrian Monk remains suspicious.

While he is looking over the crime scene, Sharona gets a call from Monk's estranged brother Ambrose, an agoraphobic who has not left his house for thirty-two years. The brothers have not spoken for seven years - Adrian is still angry at Ambrose because he never called or wrote after Trudy died. Ambrose suspects van Ranken, his neighbor, of murdering his wife Rita. Adrian and Sharona visit Ambrose and there are various clues of how dysfunctional the Monks were all those years ago. Sharona sees that Ambrose is obsessed with the belief that their father will return one day: he has saved thirty years' worth of mail and newspapers in filing cabinets, and always sets a place for their father at the dinner table. He is employed writing instruction manuals for appliances and tools, at which he is very successful. Despite his eccentricities, Sharona can tell that his intellect is on a par with or even surpasses Adrian's - he has a similarly prodigious memory, and has taught himself to speak and write over seven languages. After leaving, Sharona actually hugs Adrian, thanking him for making her own family seem normal.

Ambrose is suspicious of van Ranken, as two nights ago, Ambrose heard van Ranken and his wife arguing, and heard gunshots. Three hours later, van Ranken got in his old pickup truck, drove away and was gone all night. The next morning, Ambrose called the house looking for Rita, and van Ranken said she had flown to Argentina. Suspiciously, he denied leaving the previous night, saying his truck had been broken down all summer. Adrian dismisses his brother as delusional, but as they are leaving the house, he notices the dead spot on the grass under van Ranken's truck. Indeed, the truck has been moved recently.

Adrian and Sharona visit van Ranken, on the pretext of taking back a bag of flour that Rita borrowed from Ambrose, and Adrian catches van Ranken red-handed in several lies about his wife's whereabouts. For instance, he has a parking permit for a local state park that indicates that he got to the entrance near closing time, one of Rita's shoes is in the trash can, and there is evidence to suggest that he has been bleaching the floor.

The next day, Adrian and Sharona follow van Ranken back to the fair. He takes part in a potato sack race and deliberately trips in order to win second prize: another cherry pie (he only gets in by taking a ripped sack). Later, they see him rooting around in it, looking for something, apparently without finding it. Ambrose remembers that Rita baked three cherry pies to give away at the fair, and there must be something in them, or one of them, worth killing for. Stottlemeyer is skeptical, but admits that there was no pie in the car when the police got there. However, the airline records confirm that Rita van Ranken boarded a plane to Buenos Aires on the night of the murder.

The next day, Adrian and Sharona track van Ranken back to the fair again, having found that the third and final cherry pie will be given away at bingo. Despite purchasing twelve tickets, Adrian loses to van Ranken. Adrian convinces Stottlemeyer to search the third pie, but nothing is found.

Over dinner with Ambrose, Adrian berates him for not calling after Trudy died, and Ambrose, taken aback, says the reason he didn't call was because he felt guilty: Trudy was running an errand to get cough medicine for him when she was killed, and he blames himself. He breaks down crying, and Adrian, shocked, tells him it wasn't his fault, and embraces him.