The Return of Jonah Gray
Heather Cochran

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To David and our new tax deduction

Thanks are due to everyone who lent support and guidance throughout this effort—my parents for their consistent support and interest; my first-draft readers and thoughtful critics, David Allen, Zoë Cochran and Todd Laugen; all those who assisted with my research, including folks at the IRS and Dr. Bob Laugen; my wonderful and challenging editors, Farrin Jacobs and Selina McLemore, and my steadfast agent, Katherine Faussett.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter One

I MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE DISAPPOINTED HAD IT NOT been so predictable. Martina and I were at the Escape Room, the dive bar where we’d meet after work, maybe one day in five. Martina would have gone there five in five, but she’d always been drawn to dark places and men of a certain unwashed quality. Me, I found significance in the fact that the bar was equidistant from my work and my house. Not precisely equidistant—wouldn’t that have been a fantastic coincidence though?—but within a tenth of a mile, assuming my measurements were correct. Having been an accounting major, I was trained to interpret the world through double-entry ledgers, where a debit on one side balances a credit on the other. At the bottom of the columns, if you add and subtract correctly, the totals match up. So I took symmetry as an encouraging sign, whether in a financial statement or bar location.

I was sipping my beer and leafing through the book I’d brought with me when Martina rushed back from the bathroom and practically leaped onto the bar stool beside mine.

“Sasha, I want you to meet someone,” she said.

“Well, I want you to meet someone, too,” I told her. “I want us both to meet men who are generous and kind and delight in who we are. I swear, my mother wants me to settle for any guy who will have me. But I’m not going to settle. So I’m thirty-one. That’s not old. Who says that’s old?”

“My God, would you please stop talking,” Martina said. “Sometimes, I don’t get the way you’re wired. I meant, I want you to meet someone specific. His name is Kevin.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked around. I didn’t see whom she was referring to. “And Kevin is?”

“In the bathroom. I just met him in line. He was asking me about you. He’ll be out in just a minute.”

“He was asking about me? And you’re giving me a minute warning?” I asked. She knew I needed more time than that. “You know I need more time than that. You know I like to be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” Martina asked. “The most we’re talking about is bar chatter.”

“Prepared for everything. What to ask. What I want to know. What I’ll say. What he’ll say back, then how I’ll respond to what he says back.”

“How are you not exhausted all the time? Just relax. Give the guy a chance. I promise you, he’s not the usual Escape Room fare.”

“So now there’s something wrong with the usual Escape Room fare?” I asked. “What, he’s some freak? Some anomaly?”

Martina shook her head. I followed her gaze to the man at the far end of the bar, the one whose cheek rested against a coaster, his hand upending a bowl of popcorn. Martina looked from him, back to me, smiling as if she’d won something. “How long do you figure it would take you to prep for him?” As she looked past me, her eyes went wide. “Okay, there he is. There’s Kevin,” she whispered, vacating her bar stool. “Make eye contact. Be nice. And what is that book? Principles of Accounting? Jeez, Sasha, it’s as if you were trying to make things harder for yourself.”

I looked up to see the Escape Room anomaly. The first thing I noticed was his smile. He had a nice one. More than that, he had the friendly face of a boy who might mow your lawn or hang a set of shelves for you. In short, the kind of guy who showed up at a dive like the Escape Room maybe one day in a hundred, and usually by mistake. He was a statistical outlier, and a cute one at that.

He looked at me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said back.

He pointed to the stool that Martina had just left. “Mind if I sit?” He held his hand out. “Kevin Carson.”

I shook his hand. “Sasha Gardner.”

“Does that mean that you garden?”

“No, I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

He smiled. “I always thought Sasha was a boy’s name.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. Most people I met didn’t understand my name’s origin. “In the States it’s either,” I informed him. “But you’re also right, since it’s the diminutive of Alexander in most of the former Soviet bloc. Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova. Almost all the Sashas there are male.”

“Moldova?” Kevin repeated.

I wondered if I had mumbled. Maybe it was just loud in the bar. “Moldova,” I said, louder and hopefully more clearly. “You know, in there between Romania and the Ukraine. The capital is Chisinau?”

“Chisinau?” he asked, stumbling over the pronunciation. “That’s a city or something?”

“Well, some people call it Kishinev, but you’ve got to figure that’s just a dialect difference. Besides, I’m not one for splitting hairs.” A minute in, and I was already lying to the guy, for I split hairs on a regular basis.

“I was just going to ask what you were drinking or start with the weather or something.”

I felt my cheeks flush. Why was I always assuming that people would be as interested as I was in lesser known facts and smaller topics, things that I found fascinating?

I thought quickly. “Maybe I’m Moldovan,” I said.

“But you don’t have an accent.”

“Or maybe Moldovan-American.”

Kevin nodded. “I guess I should have thought of that. I forget that everyone’s not a mutt like me. So who’s from Moldova? Your parents? Your grandparents?”

I didn’t want to lie to him again. “The truth is, I’m not the slightest bit Moldovan. That I know of, at least.”

He laughed. “Maybe we should start over,” he said. “Read any good books lately?”

Martina had shoved my dog-eared copy of Principles of Accounting into my purse, but I could still see it peeking out. “I did have a great-grandmother from Romania. Family legend has it that we’re all part gypsy.” As I said it, I picked up my purse as surreptitiously as I could and stowed it at my feet.

“Now you’re just pulling my leg.”

“It’s true,” I said. I could almost feel the words forming, the story of my great-grandmother as told through the generations. How she’d long sworn that we had nomadic blood. But I caught myself just in time. I realized that I wanted Kevin to stay and that a long-winded and unprompted account of my family history was an unlikely aphrodisiac. Besides, my father’s Anglo genes had washed out my mother’s gypsy swarthiness along with whatever remained of the ancestral wanderlust. I’d lived in California for twenty-six of my thirty-one years at that point, and with light brown hair and blue eyes, I didn’t look like any gypsy.

“Can you tell my fortune?” Kevin asked.

“Well, I could, but I’m off the clock,” I said. “I do see an intriguing stranger in your future.”

“I see one in my present,” he said.

Oh, he was good.

We talked for the next ten minutes, throughout which I managed to keep the conversation relatively light and avoid referring to any Eastern Bloc countries. He was funny, relatively new to the East Bay, and worked as a building contractor, renovations mostly. Martina, meanwhile, had taken the bar stool on my other side and struck up a conversation with the man next to her.

“I understand you’ve already met my meddling friend,” I said, elbowing Martina. She looked over and smiled at Kevin.

“In line,” he said. “Cheers on your promotion, by the way. Marketing crackers, did you say? Got any samples on you? These pretzels are stale.”

“Premium packaged edibles,” Martina said, nodding. “It goes way beyond crackers, my dear. And I don’t. I’m waiting for my next assignment. Oh, this is Carl. Carl, this is Sasha. That’s Kevin.”

“Hey,” Carl said, with a wan nod. He seemed uninterested in any detour in his conversation with Martina. He fidgeted with his key ring. From where I sat, I could see that it sported a Porsche trademark.

“So your friend pitches food. I build things. What do you do?” Kevin finally asked me.

“Besides hang around with barflies?”

“Those weird facts in your head didn’t get there by accident. And it’s a pretty head, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“You know, I got it on special over at the dollar store.”

I meant it as a joke, but he frowned a little, as if trying to gauge whether I was serious. “You’re a little kooky, aren’t you?” he finally asked.

It had taken him all of fourteen minutes to notice. Martina would probably count that as a record.

“I don’t mean that as a bad thing,” he added quickly. “But seriously, where do you work?”

I felt my heart rate rise a little. I wasn’t ready. “You know, the usual. In a building. Inside a cubicle. Behind a desk.”

“So where’s the desk?”

“Not far. Approximately 2.56 miles from here,” I said. “You could walk it, if you needed to. I mean, I didn’t. I drove.”

“2.56 miles, huh?”

“Give or take. I had my reasons for measuring it,” I added, when I saw his frown return. I wanted the smile back.

“And what do you do there, besides sit and look cute?”

“That’s about it,” I told him. “Looking cute accounts for ninety percent of my billable hours. It’s a huge growth industry.”

“No, really.” He was waiting, and at some point, I would have to answer him.

“Truthfully, I work for the government. I’m a civil servant,” I finally said.

Sometimes that would be enough. Some guys would have stopped pressing for details and let me relax. But not Kevin. He was determined. He was focused. In other circumstances, those traits would have been appealing.

“Better than being an uncivil servant,” he said.

“Only when cornered,” I said. “Then I scratch and hiss.”

He laughed. “So who do you civilly serve?” he asked. “We do a lot of government work. Maybe I’ll come visit you. Do you have a card?”

Martina must have overheard him. Suddenly, she was at my elbow. “So, Sasha, Carl was just showing me his shoes. Show Sasha your shoes,” Martina ordered, pulling us both into their conversation.

Carl held out his leg. The black leather of his loafers was shiny and even, as if he’d taken them from the box that morning.

“They’re Prada,” Martina said. “This season.”

“Wow,” I said, though I didn’t trust a man who wore triple-digit shoes. I preferred Kevin’s dusty work boots.

Carl’s shrug belied how much he cared. “You gotta dress the part,” he sniffed.

“And your part is?” I asked.

“I work over at Morgan Chase,” he said.

I knew the investment bank, so I nodded. “What do you do there?”

He paused, narrowing his eyes ever so slightly. “Well, I’m temping right now.”

“Martina, maybe you can tell me where your friend works,” Kevin said. “She’s being evasive.”

“Evasive, huh? Isn’t that ironic.” Martina laughed.

“How do you mean?” Kevin asked.

“Sasha just likes to control the flow of information. She likes knowing what’s going to happen,” Martina said. “She’s not the most madcap person. She prefers to be prepared.”

“What, are you a Boy Scout leader or something?” Kevin asked, quite seriously.

“What? No.”

“Isn’t that their motto?”

“Be Prepared?” I asked. “Well, sure. It’s the motto for both the Boy and Girl Scouts and the scout movement in general, which was founded, as you may know, by Robert Baden-Powell, who was known as B.P., bringing us full circle to Be Prepared. But no, I’ve never been a Scout. And Martina, I’ll have you know that I’m just as madcap as anyone else in this place.”

“You’re right. That was incredibly madcap.” Martina rolled her eyes.

Carl pulled out his wallet with a flourish. “I’ll get the next round,” he announced, as if to force the conversation back in his direction. He handed his credit card to the bartender.

As he passed it over, I noticed that it was an Elm Street Optimus card. I knew the brand. Not from personal use, but I knew of it. It was one of those secured credit cards, typically given to folks with major blemishes on their credit reports. From that single glance, I knew that Carl was paying upwards of twenty-five percent interest, probably a penalty for previous financial misdeeds.

I smiled, and not because he had bad credit. I smiled because, at that moment, I probably knew more about Carl-the-temp’s real life than anyone else at the Escape Room. If they were the right details, all you needed were a few.

“Thanks, man,” Kevin said to Carl. “I’ll take another beer.”

“I meant that I’d buy for the ladies,” Carl said.

I watched Kevin’s sweet smile fade.

“Temp work not paying like it used to?” I asked Carl.

Martina put a hand on my arm, but I was irked. He could cover his fancy shoes but not a simple happy-hour beer?

“It’s not like it’s a long-term gig,” Carl said.

Martina turned to me. “Play nice,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. I looked at Carl. “I wouldn’t think a guy in your financial situation would spend like that on shoes.”

Carl stopped smiling. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“No? How’s this? You’re an over-extender. You’re all plans, always with a scheme, but you’re not much for actual work. You drive a fancy car, but I bet you’re behind on your payments. You seek out women with good incomes, because your own money never comes in fast enough. You want everything before you’ve earned it. You saw the Prada shoes, so you got them. You saw Martina sit down and you figured for the cost of a few cheap drinks, maybe you’d get lucky. Besides, if you stay over at her place, the repo man won’t be able to find your beat-up old Porsche. And you’ll give Martina your work number, because you don’t expect to finish out the week there. Then you’ll start the cycle all over again. Another temp job, another bar, another girl.”

Carl had waved to the bartender before I finished speaking. “Give me my card back,” he said, his features furrowed all together.

“Is any of that true?” Martina asked. She unfolded a napkin that had been written over. “Is this your work number?”

“It’s not fucking true,” Carl snapped, right before he got up and stalked out of the bar.

Martina turned back to me. She didn’t look upset. In fact, she was sort of smiling. “It’s not like I was going to end up with a guy who spends more on shoes than I do,” she said.

“That’s what I figured. He wasn’t your type.”

“But sometimes it’s better to wait for the whole story. You’ll never know everything. You can’t.”

“I’ve heard Carl’s story more times than I can count,” I said. “I know it backwards and forwards.”

“You really ripped that guy a new one,” Kevin said. “How did you know all that?” Even before I turned to look at him, I knew that his smile was gone and it wasn’t coming back. Kooky was bad enough, but now I had scared him.

“Go ahead,” Martina said. “Why not?”

I pulled out my business card and handed it to Kevin. He looked at it, then dropped it onto the bar, as if it had burned his fingers.

Sasha Gardner

Senior Auditor

Internal Revenue Service

“I guess you see all types,” he finally said.

“All types,” I agreed.

Soon after, Kevin excused himself to go feed his parking meter. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t return. Then again, I was rarely surprised anymore. It was my job to notice details, see patterns of behavior, and infer attitudes, motives, tendencies and likely actions. Once you’ve learned to do that, you start to realize how predictable most people are. There’s actually a degree of comfort in that.

“Two guys scared off in record time,” Martina said. “That was fast, even for you.”

“I didn’t scare them off,” I said.

“Right. It must have been me,” Martina said. “Didn’t that Kevin have a nice smile?”

“Contractor,” I explained. “They get audited an average of three times throughout their careers. A lot of cash expenses. I knew as soon as he told me.”

Martina shook her head. She reached into my purse and pulled out my accounting book. She placed it on the bar between us. “Guys skip the brainy girls.”

“That’s not always true.”

“Okay. Guys skip girls who can assess penalties with interest.”

I conceded the point.

“And he was cute,” she went on. “If you’d just said that you work at the Gap, you’d be on your way to a first date right now.”

“I don’t work at the Gap,” I reminded her. “That’s the problem. That’s always the problem.”

Chapter Two

SO PEOPLE SOMETIMES TRIED TO AVOID ME. SURE, I might have wished it were different, but I was an excellent auditor. Not everyone could do my job. Not everyone could build lives atop quantitative foundations or look beyond numbers to the events and decisions that put them there. The best auditors love to unravel the story that lurks in the data, to see hidden meanings and solve the puzzle. They have an eye for detail and great powers of concentration.

At least, they should, and I always had. Only, sometime earlier that month, I had started to drift. I couldn’t trace it to a single event or day. I’d only realized it once inertia had taken hold—like a cold you think you can keep from catching, or maybe it’s just allergies, and then one day you wake up clogged and froggy and foggy. Looking back, it felt gradual. I was late for work a few times one week, and again the next. I noticed that the muscles in my thighs were a little sore from bending at the knees to sneak by my colleagues’ cubicles. My calves felt stronger from taking the stairs more often to avoid running into my boss in the elevator. And then there was that feeling, more and more frequent, of having barely dodged a pothole or avoided a stray banana peel.

Luckily, I’d been at my job long enough to know the minimum amount of work I could do without raising concern. I hadn’t even noticed the extent of my distraction until the day that my friend Ricardo, our office’s hiring manager, found me in the supply closet.

“Are you okay?” he asked, after knocking on the door.

“Sure. Why?” I asked back, looking up from a box of pens.

“Uh, because you’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes.”

“Oh please.”

“You have. I saw you go in and thought I’d wait, but you never came out. I thought maybe you were having a tryst.” He looked around the closet to see whether anyone else was hiding amid the office supplies. “What have you been doing?”

“Thinking, I guess.” I hadn’t realized it had been twenty minutes.

“Thinking? In here? About what?”

I decided to be honest about where my mind had been. “Legal pads are yellow, right? And the original highlighters were yellow, too.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So wouldn’t they have been useless on a legal pad? I think maybe that’s why highlighters ended up branching out into blue and green and pink, while legal pads remain yellow.”

“There are white legal pads,” Ricardo said. “I’ve seen them in all different colors.”

“Sure, but when you think ‘legal pad,’ you think ‘yellow,’ don’t you?”

“Honey, unless I’m bedding a handsome lawyer, I don’t think about legal pads.”

“And then there are these ledger books, which are always light green. My theory is that they’re green because they’re reminiscent of the dollar bill, since they’re intended to hold financial data. But that begs the question of whether ledger pads are also green in England. Because the British pound isn’t green, and that might imply a totally different color origin.”

“I don’t get it,” Ricardo said.

“You asked what I was thinking about.”

“I mean, why are you worrying about this? You’ve been in here for twenty minutes contemplating the history of office supplies? It’s August, sweetie. Every other auditor is complaining about the workload. I assume you’re snowed under, too. Is everything okay? You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“You think I’m not getting my work done?” I asked, careful to sound indignant.

“I’m just pointing out that maybe your investigative energy could be put to better use than in here.”

I made a show of taking a box of pens before returning to my cubicle. What he didn’t say—maybe he didn’t know—was that I wasn’t getting my work done. I hadn’t been for weeks.

Before that August, I’d taken pride in my ability to plow through, audit after audit, without a drop in focus. But the morning after Kevin’s unceremonious leave-taking from the Escape Room, I’d begun to review a return, only to find myself eavesdropping on Cliff, the auditor who sat on the far side of my cubicle wall. Later that afternoon, I had spent twenty minutes trying to deduce which grocery chain would be carrying the best peaches—based on proximity of the largest stores to local trucking routes. Moments after, I’d found myself wondering why horses and cats and dogs have hair but rabbits have fur. Ricardo was right; I was in trouble.

In my double-wide cubicle at our Oakland district office, I stood up, jogged in place, did a few jumping jacks, then sat back down. I stared hard at the paperwork on my desk, hoping that the brief burp of exercise had forced blood into my brain. Ricardo had a point: the auditing season was in full swing. Stacks of folders had massed on my worktable, each file representing a return awaiting my analysis. I had to buckle down. I had to find some momentum or fake as much. I was a senior auditor, not a veterinarian, nor a fruit wholesaler, nor an office-supply historian. I was supposed to be setting an example.

Then the phone rang, and I imagined that it might be Kevin, feeling guilt over his graceless getaway from the aptly named Escape Room. Maybe he had memorized my phone number and was calling to apologize. Maybe he’d called the IRS switchboard and asked for an auditor named Sasha. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Near the edge, maybe, but not beyond it.

“Sasha Gardner,” I answered, glad for the excuse to close the file in front of me.

“So S is for Sasha then,” a man said. It wasn’t Kevin.

“In my case, yes.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by the comment. “May I help you?”

“You’re not even a man,” he said. It sounded like an insult.

“That’s true,” I agreed. “Though, as you probably know, Sasha is a male name in parts of Eastern Europe. How can I help you, sir?” I always tried to be polite at work. During any audit, and in the necessary correspondence before and after, I strove to remain detached but formal. I called people sir and ma’am and addressed them by their salutation and last name, assuming I knew it. There were strict codes of behavior to be followed when interacting with the public, and I took a certain pride in adhering to them. People will grasp at any excuse to hate the IRS, and one of my jobs was to keep them empty-handed.

“My name’s Gordon, and I’m calling to tell you to stop what you’re doing. Just stop it! Cease and desist!”

I glanced at the pad of paper on my desk. Earlier, I’d been doodling. Pictures of sailboats and rough waters. Pictures of trees, uprooted, leaves piling and swirling around them. “What I’m doing?” I repeated.

“Pestering an honest, upstanding, hardworking man,” the man named Gordon said.

“Do I know you?” I asked. “Was I pestering you?”

Gordon harrumphed into the phone. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to get your mitts on all of us. Well, you won’t. Not if I can help it,” he said.

“But—” I tried to cut in.

“You make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?

“Sir—” I tried again.

“All you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.

I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.

“That is not a happy face.”

At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.

“I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”

“We have a question,” Susan said.

“Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.

“Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”

“Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”

“Paper?” Susan asked.

“Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.

“And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.

I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”

Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.

“Fine. You win,” she said.

“Win what?” I asked.

“I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”

“Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”

“I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.

“Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

Ricardo started to laugh.

I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.

“Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”

“Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.

I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.

I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.

“I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.

“Resident warehouse,” I muttered.

“You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.

“Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.

But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.

“Sasha Gardner,” I answered.

“Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you have some nerve.”

“Do you?” I’d never considered myself particularly brave.

She didn’t answer. She just kept barreling on. “You’re harassing one of the best people I’ve ever known. If you’d only take the time to know him, to talk to him, you’d see.”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked, understanding at once the sort of nerve she’d meant. My cheeks started burning. “Who is this?”

“But no, you have to drop your poison into his life. Now, I don’t know what sort of a family you were raised in, Ms. Gardner, but I hope you take a good look at how you’re spending your time on God’s green earth and move on to better things. He’s had a hard enough year. Look at all he gave up. And for what? To have you bothering him? How about planting some happiness for a change and letting go that misery you sow?”

“Who are you?” I asked again. “How did you get my name? Do you know Gordon?”

“I’m a concerned citizen who felt an obligation to tell you that you work for the worst branch of our government.”

“The IRS isn’t its own branch,” I said. “We’re a part of the Treasury which is a part of…” She had hung up. “Never mind.”

I replaced the handset. In my previous six years at the service, I hadn’t received even one complaint. Now two in one afternoon? I looked around my office for clues. I listened for Cliff’s voice, wondering whether he was receiving the same phone-line vitriol. How could I defend myself when I didn’t know what I’d done, or to whom I’d done it? Who was this “he” that both callers had referred to?

I was so flustered that when my phone rang again, I barked into it. “I know—I’m awful. There, I beat you to it, didn’t I? Surprised?”

“Uh, this is Jody in reception. Your three o’clock appointment is here.”

“Oh. Sure, Jody. I’ll be right there.”

I had to get it together. I took a deep breath and glanced at my watch. That made me smile and, at least briefly, forget the phone calls. It was three o’clock exactly. They were right on time.

I had predicted by the way they prepaid their bills that the Ritters would be punctual. I had a clear-cut image of them in my mind: Donald Ritter, the avuncular former radio-station manager, his stomach straining against the spongy weave of a golf shirt, his all-purpose, slip-on sneakers, and Miriam, who’d only started to work that year, half time at a children’s clothing store. She would get her hair set every week, was a crossword fanatic and probably carried her knitting in a public-radio tote.

I didn’t know if the image I had built would be accurate, of course. I was never sure before I got an auditee into my cubicle. But I enjoyed the puzzle immensely, as well as the interim between the moment I wasn’t sure and seconds later, when I was. Imagine a life. Have you got it? I mean, have you really got it? Well then, let’s raise the curtain and bring out Donald and Miriam.

I walked into our no-frills reception area and looked around. Three sets of folks were waiting. One guy, off the bat I knew he was way too slick. He wore a perfectly tailored suit and crocodile loafers. My folks, the Ritters, they were savers. They weren’t wealthy, but I reckoned they’d been saving ten percent of Don’s take-home for the past twenty years. The guy in the suit—he’d dropped some serious cash (or more likely, credit) on his threads.

And anyhow, the crocodile man had an oily, better-than-you-are air. Donald and Miriam were softer than that, more hamburgers and horseshoes. The year before, they had donated an old car to a children’s hospital and hadn’t even claimed full value.

The folks by the door were too young. I knew that the Ritters had recently moved into a senior-living community, and both members of a couple usually had to have passed fifty-five to buy into such a development. Call me a warehouse, but that was the obscure sort of rule I got paid to keep track of.

“Ritter,” I called out, looking directly at the couple I had pegged as Donald and Miriam.

They stood. Tote bag and slip-on sneakers. I loved being right.

“I’m Sasha Gardner,” I told them. “Would you follow me, please?”

They looked unhappy to see me. I got no joy from ruining their day, but you can’t complete an audit without a face-to-face interview. It gives people a chance to explain themselves. Auditing might sound formulaic, but even I’d been surprised a few times. Sometimes, I would think I had someone pegged as an evader, and she’d arrive with a God’s honest explanation about the terrible year she’d had (and that’s why her numbers had gone all to hell). Other times, a taxpayer I thought I would surely let off would sit down and start lying through his teeth, even about the legit stuff. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.

“Here we are, Mr. Ritter, Mrs. Ritter,” I said when we arrived at my cubicle.

“Call me Mitzi.” As she folded up the newspaper she’d been holding, I could have sworn I caught sight of a crossword.

“Mitzi, then,” I agreed. “Have a seat.”

I noticed her staring hard at me. “You’re so young,” Mitzi Ritter finally said. She turned to her husband. “This girl can’t be older than Molly.” She turned back to me. “You’re not, are you?”

“Molly?” I asked.

“Our daughter,” Mitzi said. “You don’t know that? They said you’d know everything about us.”

“They?”

“Our new neighbors got audited once,” Don Ritter said. “Everybody has an opinion.”

“I don’t know everything,” I said. “But we don’t mind the rumor if it keeps people honest.” I smiled at Don Ritter to try to put him at ease.

He didn’t smile back.

I had assumed that the Ritters had kids by the size of their former house. “I take it Molly’s not a dependent anymore,” I said.

“Oh no. She’s been out of the house since, gosh how long has it been, Don?”

“Ten years,” Don said.

“Has it been that long?”

“She’ll be twenty-eight come December.”

“Time sure flies,” Mitzi clucked, then turned to look at me. “How old are you?”

I saw Don Ritter roll his eyes.

“Is that rude?” Mitzi asked. “It’s only because you look so young.”

“You think everyone looks young,” Don said.

“I’m thirty-one,” I told them.

“So young,” Mitzi said.

“So listen, Mr. and Mrs. Ritter. I mean, Mitzi. I imagine you weren’t exactly thrilled to receive my notice of your audit.”

Mitzi looked at her husband, who frowned, sitting a little higher in his chair and pulling his golf shirt down over his belly. Mitzi tried a smile. “There was a bit of language. I won’t repeat it here.”

“I know how you feel,” I said.

“Have you been audited, too?” she asked, eyes wide. “They do that?”

“Actually, no. Yes, they do audit auditors. I haven’t been tagged yet though.”

“Then you don’t know what it’s like,” Don said.

“Well, my father’s a certified public accountant, and my mother is a busybody. I kind of view my childhood as a series of unwelcome investigations.”

“I suppose it could have been worse,” Don Ritter said. “At least we’ve still got our health.”

“That’s a blessing,” Mitzi agreed. “Can’t take that for granted.”

“No, you can’t,” I said. Indeed, it was a subject I could have spoken about at length. Deep down, I knew it was the reason behind my current distraction. But other audits were waiting, piled high upon my table. I smiled at the Ritters. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Chapter Three

THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, I COULD HEAR MY phone ringing. I was just getting home, jacket and book in one hand and mail tucked under my arm, digging through my purse to find my keys. I hated that. A ringing phone and my response was practically Pavlovian. My heartbeat would quicken, and I’d bolt into over-drive, rushing, trying to shove my key in the lock, tripping over my purse, skittering across the room, and what were the chances it would actually be someone I wanted to talk to? Nine times out of ten, my desperate lunge got me to the phone in time for a sales call. Or, as on that day, my mother. And I’d been in such a fine mood leaving work.

“You sound like you’re out of breath,” she said. “You’re not getting enough exercise, are you?”

“I just got home,” I told her, picking up my purse, my mail, my jacket, my accounting book. Disappointed for some reason. Who did I expect that elusive tenth caller to be? Who would be worth the lunge and the scattered mail and the bent book jacket? No one sprang to mind.

“You work too hard,” my mother said.

“It’s not even six yet.”

“Long and hard aren’t the same thing.” My mother had held a part-time job for about six months, twenty-six years earlier. Apparently, it had given her a lifetime of insight.

“Were you calling about something in particular?”

She sighed. “I was just thinking about you and Gene.”

I looked at my mail and frowned. “What about Gene?”

“I want you to be happy, sweetheart. Are you happy?”

I had been before I’d answered the phone, I thought. There had been no more blistering phone calls, and the Ritters’ audit had gone well. In my analysis, I’d discovered that they hadn’t taken the full deduction on the appreciation of their former house (at issue was an upgraded bathroom), so I had sent them away with a refund. They were so surprised and relieved that they had invited me to a barbecue at their house that coming Labor Day. Of course, I wouldn’t go. Auditors never got involved with current or past auditees, not outside the office. It was important to remain impartial.

Still, it was nice to be asked and even nicer to feel as though I’d performed a public good rather than a necessary evil. Don’t get me wrong—auditing is about fairness. I mean, I pay my taxes. And people living in this country and driving on its roads and breathing its air, well, why should some folks foot the bill while others sneak off? But this audit had been different. I had actually made the Ritters’ lives easier. I liked the feeling that left me with—a sense of pride and satisfaction that drained dry as I spoke to my mother.

“Sure I’m happy,” I told my mom. “As much as anybody else.” That I’d been off at work of late wasn’t something I would ever admit to her. She would have leaped at an opening to tell me that I was in the wrong profession.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “What’s up with you and Gene? I want to know, but you don’t have to tell me.”

I was long since sorry that my key hadn’t slipped away from my fingers in the bottom of my bag, at least for a few more seconds. Couldn’t I have hit another red light on the way home? My mother was an expert at the “I’m not overstepping, I’m just interested” arm-twist.

“Nothing’s up with me and Gene.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means we’re not dating anymore. Like I told you.”

“It was your job, wasn’t it? That job is always interfering with your love life.”

“You’re the one who’s always interfering with my love life,” I reminded her. “Gene had no problem with my job.”

“And I don’t have to tell you how unusual that is. You don’t toss a guy like that out with your dirty dishwater.” An image of my ex-boyfriend, shrunken down and bathing in my sink flashed into my mind. It was not appealing. “And you two have so much in common,” my mother went on.

“We do?” That got my attention. She may have been the first person to say that about me and Gene. Most of my friends had chalked us up to a case of opposites attracting. Martina’s standing line was “He’s milk toast to me, but whatever makes you happy.”

“You both work for the government,” my mother pointed out.

“And? I have as much in common with the first lady.”

“You’re not saying—”

I cut her off. “No, not a lesbian, Mom.”

“Because that would be fine,” she went on.

“Gene and I broke up last month,” I reminded her.

“You never said why.”

“It wasn’t because I’m not into guys. I just wasn’t into him. He just—he never noticed anything. He only saw what was right in front of him. He never saw me.”

My mother sighed. She sounded as if she was settling in. “Marriages are work,” she said after a time. “But they’re worth it.”

Mom often used her marriage to my father as the example on which all unions should be based. She tended to gloss over her threats to leave, their trial separation years before, and the difficult times before my brother Blake was born.

“Gene and I only dated for six months. We weren’t married.” I don’t know why I felt obligated to point that out. In some recess of her mind, she must have known it.

“I’m just saying that no one’s perfect,” she said. “You’re not perfect. Your father certainly isn’t perfect. Even I’m not perfect.” She didn’t sound convinced about that last part.

“Thanks for the pep talk. Big help.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t because of your job?”

Neither of my parents was happy that I worked for the IRS, and they’d never made any effort to conceal their feelings. Indeed, I had wondered a few times before whether my longevity at the Service stemmed from the fact that I liked the job and was good at it, or because I was determined to prove my parents wrong. I had expected the negative reaction from my father who, as an accountant, took an adversarial view of the institution. But I had always expected my mother to be more supportive—if only because of the social promise held out by the auditing group’s lopsided male-to-female ratio.

Plus, she’d always been a numbers person. Even before I was learning the same concepts in school, she would tutor me in math, using examples from real life.

“Suppose you wanted to buy a hundred pairs of shoes,” I remembered her saying, “but the first store only has six in your size. What percent would you still need?”

“Why would I need a hundred pairs of shoes?” I had wondered. The absurdity of the idea was probably why I remembered the example years later.

“Oh princess, every girl eventually does.”

“I don’t,” I had said.

I remember her sighing. “Let’s just say that the price was right.”

The most meaningful numbers in my mother’s life had long been those on price tags. When I was growing up, my mother would discuss returns nearly as frequently as my CPA father, but to her a return meant that something hadn’t fit right when she got it home.

“How can you be so sure that it wasn’t your job that drove him away?” she now asked.

“Because I was the one who broke up with him. Because nothing was easy with Gene,” I said.

“And you think your father was always a peach? Remember when he brought home that crazy boat?”

“The sailboat? The Catalina? Of course I do.”

“And none of us knew how to sail.”

“I learned,” I reminded her.

“You were the only one. I couldn’t wait to be rid of that thing. You remember that boat?”

“I loved that boat.”

It was called a Catalina 22 because it was twenty-two feet long. I could still hear my father explaining that. It was a little sailboat, not suited for much more than day-tripping around the Bay. My father had bought it during the summer I was fourteen, coming home and announcing the purchase to my mother, my brother Kurt and me. My mother hadn’t received the news well. She preferred to be the one who made our family’s splashy, spontaneous purchases. She reminded us that she was prone to seasickness. Why, she could barely stomach lying on a float in the pool.

Only once had the four of us ventured out on the boat together, and after that, it was just my dad and me. I was always up for a sail. I liked the bluster of the wind, even when it was too biting for comfort. I liked the spray that kicked up as the boat galloped over wakes. I liked the nuanced adjustments we’d make as soon as the wind shifted direction.

But that following winter had been a rough one at home. That was the winter my mother took a breather from the rest of us, holing up for a week in the family condo in Tahoe. Maybe the Catalina was one of the things she took issue with. Maybe my father simply knew what it would take to bring her back home. I don’t know when he sold it, only that the Catalina was gone by the time the following spring turned to summer. And when Blake was born, not long after, the subject of a replacement sailboat was effectively tabled.

I had always planned to buy one of my own. It was the reason I had saved my babysitting profits throughout high school and on into college. I imagined myself living out of the little cabin as I sailed up and down the west coast, stopping off at small, natural harbors to camp along the shoreline. I would rent a small apartment near the marina in San Rafael—or in the town of Tiburon if I was really lucky. And while other people spent their weekends pressed up against city crowds, I’d shove off and sail away.

Don’t get me wrong. I know I wasn’t the first person to land far afield of a childhood dream. Most people probably do. And the fact that I had never followed through on my plan wasn’t a daily hang-up. I had a nice house in an appreciating neighborhood in Oakland, a secure government job, friends and family nearby. It was a fine life to be leading—even if it wasn’t the one I’d imagined, back when I was saving for my own Catalina. Of course I wondered whether things would have turned out differently if I’d bought one, but how can you know that? How can you know where a few random turns might take you? A few random turns might have changed everything. But I hadn’t taken a turn off my straightaway for a while by then.

“I should go,” I told my mother. Thinking of the Catalina always made me moody.

“We’ll see you Saturday then?”

“Saturday?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

“You forgot Saturday?”

“No, I remember.”

“It’s only our thirty-fifth anniversary. It would be nice to have our children present.”

“I said I remembered. I’ll be there.”

“Come early if you want. You should spend more time with your father,” she said.

“He could spend more time with me,” I pointed out.

“Don’t be like that. Not after what he’s been through.”

I sank a little. She was right. My father had spent the first part of the year battling an aggressive form of lymphoma. Now, in August, he was officially in remission. I had a hunch that my father’s illness had a lot to do with my own malaise. The timing didn’t feel like a coincidence, but I hadn’t wanted to think too hard about it. I just wanted my focus back.

“What about your brother?” my mother asked. “Do you know if he’s coming? I haven’t been able to reach him.”

“Kurt?”

“Well, I can track down Blake easily enough. By the way, don’t forget to congratulate him when you see him next. He’s over the moon about making drum major. I don’t know if Kurt even knows about that yet.”

“I think he’s been focused on the move and the new job.”

“So focused he couldn’t manage an RSVP to his parents’ party? Martina managed an RSVP. What sort of children have I raised?”

“Speaking of Martina, I really have to go. I’m meeting her in an hour.” It was true, but it was also a good excuse.

“How is that lovely girl?” Predictably, my mother softened. Martina wore skirts and dresses. Martina got manicures and waxed her brows. Martina followed fashion trends and kept old copies of Vogue and Glamour around for reference. Depending on her mood, my mother referred to my look as “messy,” “tomboy,” or “oblivious.” She was always happy to hear that Martina and I were still friends.

“Martina knows that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” my mother was always reminding me. Maybe that was true, but who wanted to spend her life with a collection of flies?

Chapter Four

ON FRIDAY MORNING, I MET WITH MY SUPERVISOR, Fred Collins, to discuss the phone calls I’d continued to receive. By then, there had been six. Three livid, two indignant and one whiny. All referring to the poor man I’d wronged. All refusing to provide additional details—except to note that he was a much better person than I was.

“So you’re looking for your better half,” Fred said, smiling.

“It’s not funny,” I protested.

Fred seemed as flummoxed as I, though he took pains to assure me that the calls wouldn’t be recorded as complaints in my employee file. “And none of them have made reference to a name or a town? Maybe an address?” he asked.

“None. Believe me, I’ve tried to ask. They always end up hanging up on me.”

“So how can you be sure they’re calling about the same taxpayer?”

I thought about that. Auditing was based on facts, probabilities and calculations. This was just something I felt, something I was nearly sure of, but without the proof.

“I’m not,” I ventured, “but it sounds like it. It’s always the same tone. How he’s so generous and that he’s had such a hard year. They say that he’d never do this to me. Only, I don’t know what I’ve done.”

“Put it aside if you can. How’s everything else?” Fred asked. “In your work? In your life?”

I didn’t want to get into it, especially not with my boss. “Fine,” I said.

“You’ve been here what, ten, twelve years now?”

“Six, actually.”

“Only six?” Fred sounded surprised. “Doesn’t it seem like longer?”

When I first joined the IRS, I hadn’t planned to travel the career track. It’s funny what you can wind up doing if you show an aptitude. If I’d been able to choose my talents, I’d probably have chosen something physical. I’d have been a gold medalist on the uneven bars. I’d have sailed solo down the Pacific coast at age twelve. But kids tend to develop talents noticed and nurtured by their parents. Given that my father was an accountant, it was my knack for numbers that was coddled, and it was just as well—I was too tall for a serious career in gymnastics and the Catalina was long gone. Now, at thirty-one, that knack for numbers had elevated me into the position of senior auditor. Plunk into the middle lane of the career track.

Still, I found myself irked that Fred thought I’d been there for so much longer. Did I have the callous look of a lifer?

“Are you saying that I’ve been here too long, or that I mesh well with our corporate culture?” I asked.

He laughed. “What do you think?”

Suddenly, I wondered if he had spotted my ungainly stack of unfinished audits. But Fred was the one who seemed distracted just then. He was gazing at the framed photograph of his wife that he kept atop his desk.

“I should probably be getting back to my cubicle,” I said. A show of work ethic couldn’t hurt, especially if he’d sensed my ennui.

“Did I ever tell you how I met Marcy?” he asked, half to me, half to the photograph. Fred Collins was a gentle man and well-meaning, but his stories tended to drone. So I lied and told him that he already had.

“Anyway, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time,” I said, excusing myself.

I was headed back to my cubicle when I turned a corner and almost barreled into Ricardo.

“Just the lady I wanted to see,” Ricardo said.

Beside him stood a tall man I didn’t recognize. He appeared even taller in contrast to Ricardo, who was a slight Filipino, no more than five-two.

“Remember how I told you I made an offer for the archives position?” Ricardo asked.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Of course you do. Well, this is the guy. Jeff Hill, meet Sasha Gardner. Sasha is one of our senior auditors. That means that she rules this roost.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Jeff Hill said. I looked up and found myself staring into a pair of doleful brown eyes. Indeed, I would have thought him disappointed to be meeting me, had he not extended his hand.

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. He was so tall and thin, he reminded me of a normally proportioned person who’d been stretched out. The same mass over an elongated frame. As we shook hands, I felt the tendons and ligaments running beneath his skin.

“Sasha’s a lovely name,” Jeff Hill said, keeping hold of my hand for a moment longer than was comfortable. “You must be very skilled at your job to be a senior auditor at such a young age.”

“I like him, Ricardo,” I said. “He’s clearly brilliant.” I smiled at Jeff Hill.

“Sasha’s one of my favorite people here,” Ricardo said. “She knows everything about everything. If you ever have a question, just head for her cube.”

“He’s exaggerating,” I told Jeff.

“She’s also about the prettiest auditor you’re going to find. You should see some of the people we’ve hired in the past,” Ricardo went on. “Men and women. And their fashion sense, heaven help us all. It’s got to be the least stylish profession on record. No offense.”

“I’m not an auditor,” Jeff said, shrugging.

I watched Ricardo give Jeff a quick once-over, his eyes pulling to a stop on the new hire’s outdated loafers. The expression on Ricardo’s face was a mix of sour disgust and pity. “Right,” he said. “Archivist. Totally different.”

I didn’t think Jeff deserved quite so much sarcasm, at least not on his first day of work. Maybe fashion wasn’t high on his list of priorities, but it would have been hypocritical of me to take issue with that.

“It was nice to meet you,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“You will,” Jeff replied.

Indeed, he stopped by my cubicle not two hours later.

“Don’t tell me Ricardo sent you in here with a question,” I said. “I’m so tired of him placing bets on me.”

“Ricardo didn’t send me. I came up here on my own,” Jeff said, then he took an audible sniff. “Your cubicle smells cleaner than the other ones on this floor.” He looked around. “It is cleaner.”

“I try to keep things neat,” I said.

Jeff shook his head. “I don’t mean neat. That’s the tallest pile of file folders I’ve seen today,” he said, pointing to the stack of unfinished returns. “But cleaner. It smells lemony in here. Like a polish.”

I tried to act nonchalant. The fact was, maybe two days earlier, in a fit of procrastination, I had decided to reorder my shelf of tax statute books. In doing so, I realized how dusty they had become—and my filing cabinets and the tops of my bookshelves, too. Then I had made the mistake of taking a close look at the walls of my cubicle and found a host of strange stains—there and on the carpet—and ultimately, I had cornered a guy from the night cleaning crew and convinced him to lend me some carpet cleaner and an industrial wet-vac. The lemony furniture polish was my own, from home.

It had taken two days of working surreptitiously, but the fact was my cubicle was cleaner than the others on my floor. While I appreciated that Jeff had noticed—and right away—the history of the cleanliness was not something I wanted to explain. It would have been hard to explain it to anyone without sounding, well, obsessive.

“I think the lemon smell might be wafting over from that cubicle,” I said, my voice low. I pointed to the wall I shared with Cliff.

Jeff Hill nodded. “Listen, Ricardo and I are going to lunch today, over to a place he suggested. Mexicali’s? And I thought, if you had no other plans, you might join us.”

“I do love their enchiladas,” I said, although I’d heard that Mexicali’s had once been closed by the health department, and I said a little prayer each time I ate there. “What time are you going?”

“What time do you want to go?” he asked.

“I don’t know. What time did Ricardo say?”

“Uh, one?”

“One works. I’ve got an errand I need to run first. I’ll meet you there?”

“But you’re coming, right? I can put you down as an affirmative?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Is that a definite affirmative?”

“A definite affirmative?” I asked.

“Some people say they’ll show up and then don’t. This is California. People can be flaky.”

“You’re asking whether I would knowingly misrepresent myself?”

“Some people do.”

“Of course they do. My career is based on that assumption. But I said I’d be there, so I’ll be there.”

I thought I saw him smile a little, just a glimmer, before he went all serious again. “Then I’ll see you at one.” He nodded and turned on his heel. He was so tall, I could see his head bobbing above the cubicles as he made his way back down the hallway.

“Odd,” I found myself muttering, but I was also wondering what might get him to smile more.

I had a hard time finding parking, so it was five past one by the time I rushed into Mexicali’s. I looked around for Jeff and listened for Ricardo’s laugh (he had a whoop that could cut through a football game). But I didn’t see either of them.

I turned to the hostess. “I’m looking for a party of two that came in maybe five minutes ago?” I told her.

“Sasha?”

I spun around to see Jeff.

“See, I told you I’d be here. Am I early?” I asked. Even as I checked my watch, I knew that I wasn’t. I know that some people set their watches five or ten minutes ahead, in order to think that they’re late and then supposedly arrive on time. The only time I ever tried to fool myself like that, I remembered that I’d set my watch ahead, automatically did the math and still arrived when I was going to arrive. All I had done was add extra equations to my day, and I got more than enough subtraction practice on the job. I didn’t like to be late, but I always knew when I was and when I wasn’t.

“Five minutes falls just inside my margin of error for punctuality,” Jeff said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“Should we wait for Ricardo?” I asked.

“No need. He had to cancel at the last minute.”

“So no definite affirmative from him.” I’d never known Ricardo to be too busy for lunch.

“Shall we sit?” Jeff asked.

I nodded. So it would be just the two of us, me and a somber near-stranger. “So, tell me something,” I said as we sat. I figured I might as well find out about the guy.

“Like what?”

“How you ended up at the IRS. Where are you from?”

With that, Jeff told me that he was originally from Fresno and that the rest of his family still lived there. He said that if he hadn’t become an archivist, he would have gone into entomology.

“Insects are fascinating. So highly detailed. Such precise movements,” he said.

He explained that he had moved to the Bay area four years before and that he lived in a big apartment complex down in Fremont. As he spoke, he adjusted the placement of his water glass, arranging it in the precise center of his napkin. He did the same with a second napkin and a bottle of picante sauce. Then he picked up the saltshaker.

He caught me watching. “You’re wondering what I’m doing,” he said.

“Sort of,” I admitted. Actually, I had been wondering whether he’d been aware of his actions. Apparently, he had been.

“I’ve got a touch of OCD,” he said. “Obsessive-compulsive—”

“Disorder,” I said, nodding. “I see.”

“It’s not anything dangerous,” he said.

“I didn’t think it was.”

“It’s better than being a slob,” he said. “It doesn’t intrude on my life.”

“I’m not bothered by it. Really.”

“I like to keep track of where things are. And I like precision,” he continued, “in almost everything.”

“I imagine that’s a useful trait in your line of work.”

“Where is precision not useful? You need it in your job, too,” he said. “But yes, in archiving, it’s absolutely essential.”

Jeff’s entire body seemed to lift up when he spoke of archiving. He was a big fan of the database system the IRS used. It was the same one he’d worked on in his prior position, in the archives of the Oakland Police Department. He spoke of an archival conference he made a point of attending each January.

“A lot of archivists have real wild sides to them. Every January, a lot of us attend this conference and those guys, they go a little crazy.”

“And you?”

“Do I go a little crazy?”

“Do you have a wild side?”

He paused for a moment. “Not really, no,” he said. “I used to want one, but now, well, I think I get more sleep this way. Do you?”

I thought about it. I thought about the big plans I’d once had and the house and job that kept me company these days. “Not lately,” I had to admit.

“No loss,” Jeff said. “Impulse control is an underappreciated trait these days. And I like to plan ahead. I like to know what the future might hold. There’s a real comfort in that.”

I noticed, as our meal went on, that Jeff began to look uneasy. I wondered if something was troubling him about the imprecise way I was eating my enchiladas. Or perhaps his burrito was causing heartburn. I didn’t ask. I barely knew the guy.

Finally, Jeff Hill took a deep breath. “I found something I think you’ll want to see,” he said.

“Oh God, where—in your burrito?” I looked into what remained of my enchiladas.

“My burrito is fine,” he said. Very deliberately, he slid his plate aside and wiped his place setting. Then he pulled a few sheets of paper from his back pocket and unfolded them, smoothing them against the table. He tilted them so that I could see.

The pages had been printed off a Web site called “Gray’s Garden,” a site about horticulture—plants and flowers and such.

“Oh, I get it—my last name is Gardner, so you were thinking gardening. Actually, I’m not really into plants. All that dirt.” I slid the papers back in his direction. “My mother is. I don’t know—maybe it skips a generation. Thanks for the thought though.” I wanted to head off any gardening pitch he might have been approaching with. I knew my mother could get pretty obsessed with her seedlings. What would this guy be like?

Jeff frowned. “This section isn’t about gardening. Read what the guy says, right there.” He pointed.

I leaned in. Indeed, the pages Jeff had printed out weren’t about gardening at all; they were about being audited. Probably someone’s sob story, I figured. I’d seen a few of those in my time. First-person angst-filled narratives about the hellish experience of meeting someone just like me.

But as I continued reading, I realized that this one was different. This was a first-person narrative by a man who was about to be audited, not by someone like me—but by me.

Most of you know about my past year, he wrote. It’s been one thing after another. I’ve been waiting for a cyclone to touch down in my yard, or maybe a swarm of locusts. Well, the wait is finally over. Turns out that I’m getting audited. In yesterday’s mail, a letter arrived from our friends at the IRS. Imagine my excitement when they informed me of my upcoming appointment with “S. Gardner, Senior Auditor.”

He included, word for word, the letter he’d received—the one coldly notifying him of the upcoming audit—then went on to describe the dread he felt at the prospect of meeting me.

Does S. Gardner know the upheaval he or she has just dumped upon me? Does this person—and I must assume that S. Gardner is indeed a living, breathing human, and push aside the ghoulish images in my mind—have any idea of the wake he or she creates? I wonder how many people have met S. and emerged smiling, he wrote.

“So S is for Sasha,” I heard myself saying, just as Gordon, the first of my angry callers had, upon hearing my name.

“It’s from a Web site out of Stockton,” Jeff explained. “Someone must have told the guy your name. In the following section—I didn’t print it out, so you’ll just have to believe me—he’s figured it out.”

“Stockton?” I repeated.

“The man’s name is Jonah Gray. Do you know him?”

“Jonah Gray?” I shook my head. “Where did you find this?”

Jeff Hill sat up straight and started to fiddle with the salt and pepper shakers, arranging and rearranging them. He cleared his throat. “Online,” he finally said.

“Do you garden? You said you lived in an apartment.” I didn’t know which was stranger, the Web site or the fact that Jeff Hill, a man I had met not four hours before, was the one showing it to me.

“I used to garden a little. Back when I had a lawn. Too much dirt. And I really don’t like earthworms.” He shuddered.

“I thought you said you liked insects,” I said.

He looked very serious. “Yes, insects. Not worms. Segmented worms are a hermaphroditic mess.”

“But how did you find this?” I pressed, holding up the pages.

Jeff Hill took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “I looked you up,” he said. “And when I found that site, I thought you’d be interested.”

“You looked me up? Like a search? Like a police search?”

“I didn’t go to the police,” he said.

“I thought you said you’d worked for them.”

“Sure, I could have gone to them. But I prefer to do my own research.”

“On me?”

“On anyone.”

“What I mean is, you were doing research on me? Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because I liked your looks and Ricardo said that you weren’t dating anyone.”

I sat back in my seat, not sure where to go next. Was it the truth? It was certainly flattering. And I didn’t doubt that Ricardo would volunteer information about my dating status to anyone. It was the proactive research that had my head spinning. What sort of person did that? A stalker sort of person or just someone who was careful and detail-oriented? Was I just behind the times? Maybe everyone did that sort of research these days. I wondered what else he’d found. Hell, I wondered what else there was to find.

“So you did some quick research and then asked me to lunch? Or was it the other way around?”

“Does it matter?”

That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. “I hardly know you,” I said.

“I realize that.”

“This Jonah Gray person, I don’t know him at all.”

“So I’m ahead on that score,” Jeff said. He smiled for the first time since I’d met him. It was a nice smile, actually. It lit up his face and helped to balance out those solemn eyes.

I held up the printout. “Can I keep this?” I asked.

“Be my guest.”

“About the other stuff,” I said. “I’m flattered. I am.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I’m not asking you out.”

“You’re not?” I found myself vaguely disappointed. I wasn’t sure whether it was because I found Jeff Hill oddly appealing or because I had expected him to ask for something more. I mean, you don’t usually tell someone that you like them and then just go about your business, la-di-dah.

“You want me to?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll take that as a maybe,” he said, smiling again.

Chapter Five

GRAY’S GARDEN—THE WEB SITE—FOCUSED ON PLANT cultivation in California’s various flora zones. There were fertilizer reviews, discussions about the weather and complaints about garden pests, both common and unusual. People wrote in for advice, something the owner of the site, Jonah Gray, dispensed generously, when he wasn’t musing about various garden topics. In a cursory review of the site, I gathered that Jonah Gray resented nonnative species that required heavy watering, lamented the loss of indigenous oaks throughout California, and felt that Stockton’s insistence on pruning trees between April and October was actually helping the dreaded “eucalyptusborer” decimate entire groves. Otherwise, he tended to keep things upbeat.

As I had admitted to Jeff, I wasn’t much of a gardener, so I wasn’t particularly interested in the plight of oaks or eucalypti. I was bent on finding the references to the IRS, the audit and, in particular, me. I found what I was looking for in the discussion area. That’s where Jonah Gray had pasted the audit notification letter that had been generated by an IRS database around the same time I’d been assigned to his case. Had I been more focused that August—or rather, focused on my job instead of cubicle cleaning and legal-pad history—I would already have begun my initial analysis of Jonah Gray’s return, and his name would have rung familiar when Jeff had mentioned it.

A number of people had replied to his first post about the audit, adding details from their own experiences with the IRS and whipping up the man’s anxiety with (mostly) unfounded rumors.

JasperDad wrote: I have heard tales. You be strong, Mr. Gray, sir. Don’t let them take an extra red cent.

Skua87 wrote: This is exactly why I hide my money in my mattress.

MaxiMoss wrote: I never understood how good people could become auditors.

JasperDad replied: Good people don’t.

Two days into the discussion, Hydrangeas01 had informed everybody that S stood for Sasha and that I was female. I wondered whether Hydrangeas01 was Gordon, my first caller.

I felt as if I were eavesdropping. Here they were, talking about me, wondering about me, with no idea that I was watching. I felt like a celebrity might, albeit one of those celebrities that people find a perverse pleasure in hating.

“You didn’t call me back.” It was Ricardo, poking his head into my cubicle.

I glanced at my phone and only then noticed that the voice mail light was blinking. “You’re right,” I said, turning back to my computer screen.

“Does this mean that you’ve found your focus?” Ricardo asked. “Sorry I missed lunch.”

I looked up at him. “When are you going to stop trying to set me up?”

“As soon as I find the right guy for you. Or your mother does. But I’m determined to win this one.”

“And when are you going to stop betting on me? I’m not a horse,” I pointed out. “You really think Jeff Hill might be the right guy for me?” He was certainly bright and seemed refreshingly straightforward. I had found that I liked how he’d wasted no time in asking me to lunch. Gene had been so indecisive.

“How’d it go?” Ricardo asked. “Any sparks? He said he was going to ask you to lunch as soon as I mentioned it. He’s got great follow-through. And he’s very detail-oriented.”

“He’s also obsessive-compulsive,” I said.

“Even better.”

“He ran a background check on me.”

“He’s thorough,” Ricardo said. He sniffed. “Do you smell lemon?”

I shrugged and pointed at my computer screen. “His research pulled up the site of some guy I’ve been assigned to audit. The man’s been writing about how he dreads meeting me, and imagining what I’m going to be like. In this part here, he pictures me at my desk, counting beans. And then he goes on this tangent about beans and other legumes and how they’re often maligned in speech but incredibly nutritious and easy to grow.”

Ricardo frowned. “Is that supposed to be an insult?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But all these people on his site are up in arms on his behalf. They’re telling him that I’m awful. That I’m a monster. That I’m wicked and bound to bleed him dry. This guy Jonah, he never actually says anything bad about me, not that I’ve found, at least. He wonders and he worries, but he’s mostly just self-deprecating. I don’t know what to think.”

“Give the guy a break. He’s being audited. He can’t know how charming you are, my little bean counter.”

“You’re just trying to get back on my good side.”

“How am I doing?”

“What should I do about Jeff Hill?” I asked him.

“Did he ask you to do anything?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then there’s no decision to be made, is there?”

When Ricardo left, I turned to my worktable, to the tall stack of audits ahead of me. Somewhere in that pile, I would find him. Somewhere in there, Jonah Gray was waiting.

“Gray, Gray, Gray,” I muttered as I rifled through the stack, and then, “gotcha!”

“You okay over there?”

“I’m fine, Cliff,” I called back. I took the file folder labeled Jonah Gray back to my desk. “So, Mr. Gray,” I murmured. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I already knew that Jonah Gray lived in Stockton, and I wasn’t surprised. Many of my audits that year had been from Stockton, the same city my older brother Kurt had recently moved to, about an hour east of Oakland. Since we were a district office, I was often assigned returns from places I’d never been, and Stockton was one such place.

I took note of Jonah Gray’s street address: 530 Horsehair Road. Sometimes you could tell something about a person by the street address—whether it was a small or large apartment building or something that sounded like a town-house development or even a post office box. But 530 Horsehair Road was an address that didn’t give much away. I made a mental note to ask Kurt whether he knew the street.

I glanced at Mr. Gray’s personal information. Jonah F. Gray. Social Security number: 229—

I stopped. Now that was a number that told me something. Told me quite a bit, actually, and got my pulse going a little faster.

They say that most Americans live within fifty miles of the place where they were born. My experience with tax returns bore that out. Most California taxpayers offered up Social Security numbers showing allegiance to California, whether they were born there or were naturalized there. And if Jonah Gray had been from California originally, his Social would have begun with a number between 545 and 573, or else between 602 and 626.

But Jonah Gray was not from California, not originally at least—229 came from the East Coast, from Virginia. And specifically, it came from the southwestern corner of the state, from the rolling green hills at the cusp of the Blue Ridge Mountains, almost to Tennessee but not quite. The number 229 was from Roanoke, an old Virginia city along the salty banks of the river that gave it its name. I knew this because 229 began my Social Security number, too. So, 229 meant that Jonah Gray and I were from the same place, probably the same town, perhaps even the same zip code. That wasn’t just rare—it was something I had never before seen.

So he was a Virginian originally, but like me, he didn’t live there now. How long had he lived around Roanoke? I wondered. Had we crossed paths before? When had he left, and why? Had he been brought west by his parents, as I had been, years before? Or had he moved later, on his own volition? And how on earth did he end up in Stockton, in the agricultural belly of the San Joaquin Valley? Kurt had moved himself, his sons and his wife there to assume a tenure-track geology professorship, which he’d been torn about accepting because of its location. Stockton wasn’t commonly considered a hub of culture and industry. Indeed, it was known as a place to drive past without stopping. Then again, I realized, a lot of people might say the same about southwestern Virginia.

My phone rang.

“Are you busy?” Martina asked.

“I know why I’ve been getting those calls,” I said. I told her about Gray’s Garden. “I’m only telling you his name because he’s already discussed the audit on a public Web site.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your protocols.” On the far end of the phone, I could hear her typing. “Ah,” she said. “Huh.”

“Huh, what?”

“I like him. Is he single?”

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“No. Is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t check?”

“I didn’t get to that field yet. You like him?”

“He’s got a good sense of color, for one. It’s an attractive site.”

“So you mean you like his Web site.”

“It’s inviting. Attractive site, attractive guy,” she said, as if I should have made the same connection.

“That’s not a given,” I pointed out.

“Well, he sounds appealing. If he grows plants, you’ve got to figure that he likes working with his hands. And I do like a guy with good hands. Did you check yet?”

“He’s from Virginia,” I said.

“So what? Oh, I forgot. You lived there, didn’t you?”

“I’m from there,” I corrected her.

“But you’ve been in California practically forever.”

“But I’m from Virginia. And the same part that he’s from.” I couldn’t explain, but I felt that this was important, even though it was true that I’d spent more than three-quarters of my life elsewhere. I looked back at the first page of his return and felt a sudden flutter. I realized that I didn’t want to share the news with Martina, but I had to. She wasn’t going to forget she’d asked.

“He’s single,” I said.

“He is? Perfect,” she said. “Where does he live? Or maybe I should just write to him through his Web site. I’m totally going to write to him.”

“He lives in Stockton,” I said.

There was a pause. “Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

“I’ve been assigned a lot of Stockton audits this year. It’s random. I don’t know why.”

“Never mind then.”

“What, just because he’s in Stockton?”

“Geographically undesirable, my dear.”

I felt myself smile a little.

“So what does Mr. Stockton do anyway? No way this site is a full-time gig.”

In his file folder, I flipped to the back of his return, to the field just below his signature. “He’s a journalist,” I told her.

Journalists weren’t often targeted by the Service, but like a number of my assignments that August, Jonah Gray was a randomly chosen compliance audit. Every year, a sample set of taxpayers gets tagged by pure chance. I appreciated compliance audits for the challenge of not knowing what to look for, but I did sympathize with folks on the receiving end. Out of the blue, they were ordered to gather their records and justify their claims and often had to bring in a certified public accountant to weed through the process. And still, maybe half the time, the IRS wouldn’t find anything amiss. My father, an accountant for going on forty years at that point, liked to say that compliance audits were like revving a car engine once a month. You needed to do it, if only to keep things running. Then again, as a CPA, he got paid no matter how things turned out.

“He’s a journalist?” Martina said. “That’s like you, only cooler.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve got to figure that auditors and journalists are opposite sides of the same coin. With auditors being the quantitative, nerdy side. No offense.”

“How am I the flip side of a journalist? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re both ferreters. You’re more interested in finding the truth than pulling down a high salary. Journalists are always sniffing around for a story, looking for the why and who and how. Same as you. I bet he’s actually perfect for you. Too bad he’s in Stockton.”

“And that I’m auditing him.”

“I know, I know. You’ve got all those rules.”

Martina had to get off the line to take a call from her boss. After I’d hung up, I sat there, wondering if what she’d said was true. I supposed that I was a ferreter, though I’d never thought of myself in rodent terms. But she had a point. I sorted through bills and bank statements, interest income and mortgage expense and capital gains, in order to find my own version of a story. I was about to do the same with Jonah Gray’s life.

I stared at the first page of his return, studying the way he’d printed his address, 530 Horse hair Road, all caps, in black ink. He was obedient, at least in those first few lines. The IRS requests black or blue ink, but I’d seen purple and green, too. And once, pink. You’ve got to figure a guy who fills out his tax form in pink is daring you to do something about it. In his case, actually, we did. I don’t advise people to assume that the IRS has a hearty sense of humor.

Because Jonah Gray had handwritten his address information, I figured he’d moved to Horsehair Road within the past year, and that he’d prepared his own return. Taxpayers who’d stayed at the same address year after year are sent forms with preprinted labels. And an accountant would have printed the return straight from a computer.

I respected a self-prepared return. It took more effort, but it meant that Jonah was someone who wanted to know where his money went. I’d seen plenty of people get into trouble by signing everything over to CPAs, though I’d have caught hell if I ever told my father that.

So Mr. Gray was a journalist, I thought. I glanced at his W2 (stapled, as requested, to the front of his return). His employer was the Stockton Star, which a quick bit of research confirmed was Stockton’s local newspaper. But the salary he’d been paid was too low for a reporter, even at a small city rag. That meant he was part-time or that he had taken the job midway through the previous year.

Then I noticed a second W2 stapled beneath the first. Now I was getting somewhere. Before he began working for the Stockton Star, Jonah Gray had been earning fully three times as much as a writer for the Wall Street Journal. What’s more, he’d lived in Tiburon. Tiburon—the same marina hamlet in Marin County where I was going to dock my Catalina. But why would anyone leave Tiburon and the Wall Street Journal to write for the Stockton Star?

“What the hell is all this?” Ricardo was back, standing before my desk, his arms crossed. “I can hear it all the way over in my office. You can’t be getting any work done.” He looked toward the ceiling and shook his fist.

Only then did I notice the construction noise that drifted and clanged down from the fifth floor. When had that begun? I worked on four, and it was rare that sound would seep up or down from the surrounding levels. Usually, my floor’s sounds were white collar—the papery flutter of returns being slipped in and out of folders; the soft metallic click of a file cabinet closing; the clitter-tick of a calculator. But now, hammering, sawing, the clamor of pipes being hit and the whir of machinery clattered around my cubicle.

I hadn’t heard them until Ricardo came in. Had my concentration returned?

Without waiting for an invitation, Ricardo pulled up a chair and sat down. “I thought I would hide out over here for a few minutes, but this is chaos,” he said.

I watched a flake of ceiling tile drift like snow onto my desk.

“That can’t be healthy,” Ricardo said.

“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked. I liked Ricardo and his visits were usually a welcome break, but I was eager to find out more about Jonah Gray.

“I don’t actually. My archivist is hired and the next sexual harassment seminar isn’t for a month. What are you doing?”

“An audit.”

“The bean guy? It’s the bean guy, isn’t it? Ol’ Beanie Beanerson.”

“He’s a journalist,” I said. “He used to work at the Wall Street Journal, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh Lord, really?” Ricardo sounded put out.

“You don’t approve?”

“Journalists are so self-righteous,” Ricardo said. “It’s always, let me tell you what to think, let me tell you what to know. And financial types are the worst. Present company excluded, I mean.”

“Maybe the journalists you’ve met, but on his Web site, he actually invites debate. About plants, at least. And fertilizer.” Before I could say anything more, Ricardo held out his hand.

“What?” I asked.

“Give it. Give me the return.”

“I’m not really supposed to—”

“Oh, please child. Hand it over.”

I handed him the first page of Jonah Gray’s return, and Ricardo pretended to skim it.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he clucked.

I could tell that he wasn’t actually reading it. “What do you think being a journalist says about his personality?”

“Since when do you care about personality?” Ricardo asked, as a particularly loud crack from above sent a piece of ceiling onto his lap. He brushed it off in disgust. Ricardo had a point. I usually focused on what an occupation said about a taxpayer’s propensity for fraud. Some, like Kevin the contractor, had greater opportunities than others. With that, I realized that I hadn’t thought about Kevin all day. Gene, either. What a relief that was.

“He’s probably one of those earnest droners utterly devoid of humor,” Ricardo added.

“I know for a fact that’s not true,” I said.

“You’re defending the guy?”

I felt my cheeks redden. “What I mean is, on his Web site, someone was asking about a plant called ‘hen and chicks.’”

“Hen and chicks?”

“Apparently, it’s a succulent.”

“Succulent,” Ricardo said lasciviously.

I ignored him. “So he writes, did you hear about the city guy who went to the country and bought fifty chicks? The next week he buys a hundred, and the week after that, two hundred. Finally, the clerk at the country store says, ‘You must be doing really well with your chicks,’ and the city guy says, ‘No. I guess I’m either planting them too deep or too far apart.’” I laughed a little. It was a silly joke.

Ricardo didn’t crack a smile. “That’s disgusting.”

“Oh, come on. It didn’t actually happen.”

“Dead smothered chickens?”

“I was just trying to make the point that he’s not humorless. I was thinking that, being a journalist, he’s probably curious, too.”

Ricardo perked up. “Curious like bi?”

“No.”

“Like weird?”

“No, curious like…curious.”

“Like a monkey,” Ricardo said, nodding.

“If that helps you.”

I didn’t know what beat Jonah Gray covered for the Stockton Star, or what he’d focused on at the Journal, but on Gray’s Garden, the man seemed game for anything. One reader had recently returned from a trip to the Cook Islands and wrote of seeing a rare palm, related to the sago, only larger.

I’ve never even heard of such a beast! Jonah Gray had replied. You must tell us more. Do you have pictures? Can we see? Do you want me to post them? Then he admitted to having spent all afternoon researching sago palms and their closer relatives.

Someone like that was an explorer of sorts, I thought, interested in things beyond his own experience. I don’t mean that I’d deduced from a Web site on plant maintenance that the man sought to explore faraway countries or vast oceans. But I was willing to bet that he’d be game enough to try out the new Thai place in town.

Not everyone will. By the end of my six months with Gene, I’d noticed that he rarely agreed to try anything new. Gene worked as a mailman and loved that he could wear the same uniform and walk the same route every day. The guy knew what he knew, liked what he liked, and was content—even happy—to exist inside of such fences. He didn’t look beyond them, and he didn’t want to. Motivating him to go out was always a chore. He’d see movies, but preferred those with actors whose work he knew, and he would study the reviews and synopses beforehand, and even download the trailers. By the time we got to the theater, I felt as if I’d already seen the damn thing. Gene knew this about himself, and he explained that he found the rhythm of his methods comforting. I appreciated the guy’s self-awareness and I respected his consistency. He’d never lie and he’d never judge out of turn. All the same, in our time together, I’d grown to find his habits a little stifling.

Ricardo yawned. “Those journalist types are always getting their panties in a lather about freedom.”

“I think you just created a hostile work environment.”

“You know, freedom of information. Freedom of the press. Blah blah blah,” Ricardo said, waving the first page of Jonah Gray’s return around.

A loud bang sounded then, and Ricardo and I looked up in tandem. I could hear muffled swearing at the same moment that a drizzle of water began to seep through the ceiling at one end of my cubicle.

“Jesus on a bike!” Ricardo shrieked. He jumped from his seat and ran into the hallway. “Grab a bucket and call security if that gets worse. I’m going to see what gives. You want to bet this is an OSHA violation?” He ran off.

I pulled my trash can under the leak as the swearing from above grew louder. Then I hurried back to my desk. I wasn’t afraid of getting wet. The fact was, for the first time all month, I wanted to keep working. I wanted to know more about this Jonah Gray character.

But when I turned back to his file, I realized that Ricardo had been holding the first page of the return when he’d run upstairs. Immediately, I called Ricardo’s extension and left a message on his voice mail. Then I called his assistant and asked that Ricardo come see me as soon as he returned.

“He took something of mine and it’s crucial that I get it back immediately,” I told him.

“I’ll leave him the message,” Ricardo’s assistant said.

“Crucial,” I repeated.

“I promise I’ll tell him.”

Luckily, six years on the job had taught me plenty of ways to move ahead without page one. As the racket continued, some creaking now and continued shouts, I turned to Jonah Gray’s deductions.

I hated the standard deduction. I know—it takes less time and it’s a lot simpler to use. But to an auditor, it’s a black box. Standard deductions kept me at a distance. Itemized deductions were where the story of someone’s year would emerge. Itemized deductions could speak volumes about character and passion and luck and changes in circumstance. They humanized the numbers and offered a clearer glimpse into the life beyond.

Sometimes, I’d skim down the page and come away with a vivid sense, almost visceral actually, of someone who was at the top of their game. Luck had shone on them—maybe through gambling earnings or investment income or inheritance—and now it was time to give back. I’d see gifts to a variety of charities, amounts that had been capped at a hundred dollars in earlier years suddenly rising higher. Old cars donated away. Houses bought for relatives. It was heady to experience such generosity, even through the filter of a tax form.

Other times, I’d run across clear markers of financial distress. A home that burned, an insurance report, attempts to value cherished possessions, now ash. A family living at the edge of their means, getting by on advances from relatives and subsidies they never before had to accept. And me, realizing that my audit would be the nadir of what had already been a terrible year.

Jonah Gray’s deductions were a mixed bag, but my overwhelming impression was one of renunciation. He had unloaded a great deal in the year before. Old clothing to Goodwill, computer equipment to a teaching nonprofit, a bed and a couch to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars branch. Though any one of those deductions could have been prompted by a deep spring cleaning, taken as a whole they felt like someone saying goodbye to an entire life.

What had caused that? Had it coincided with the move to Stockton? Had he been ill? I noticed that he’d carried some significant out-of-pocket medical expenses. And why on earth had he paid for a membership in the AARP? The man was thirty-three years old.

Whatever it was, it had happened in July. That much I knew. It was July when he’d stopped working at the Journal, moved from Tiburon and given away so many of his belongings. It was in July that he’d filled out a loss report, detailing the destruction of a California black oak at 530 Horsehair Road. But were those things related? What had happened?

Knowing how much he cared for flora, I looked closely at the details of the tree loss. The black oak, estimated to have been sixty-five years old, had been plowed into by a truck and mortally wounded. You can’t replace a tree like that—even with my minuscule knowledge of greenery, that seemed obvious. But had he valued a tree more highly than his life in Tiburon? Did he move to Stockton as penance?

I turned back to his deductions and that’s when I saw it—the donation of a boat to charity. Not just any boat. He had given away a twenty-two-foot Catalina. Of all the boats on all the bays and oceans and lakes and estuaries, Jonah Gray had been sailing around in the one I’d wanted. He’d donated it to something called the American Aphasia Association. I didn’t know much about aphasia, only that it was a disorder that affected someone’s ability to use or understand words. If that was so important to him, he could have given the Catalina to me, I thought. I had no words for the coincidence.

My phone rang.

“Sasha Gardner.”

“He’s a good man,” a woman said.

“Jonah Gray?” I asked.

She didn’t seem surprised that I knew his name. “If you met him, you’d see that this is a wild-goose chase,” she said.

“Listen, it’s not personal. I’m just doing my job. It’s a compliance audit.”

“You think you’re so special?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That young man, he gives. He gives to anyone who asks, and what does he want in return? Nothing. And after all he’s been through.”

“What has he been through? Why did he give up the boat and move to Stockton? Did it have to do with the oak tree?” I cringed a little, hearing what sounded like desperation in my voice. But it suddenly felt very important that I figure it out. I felt like I had to know the answers. This wasn’t my usual, measured approach. More often I made assumptions based on details in returns, then tested them against the evidence I collected. But I could not yet piece together the story of his past year. I found myself at a loss. And yet I wanted to know.

My caller was not inclined to help me. “Like you care,” she grunted.

“I do,” I said. “We’re both from Virginia. And we both sail. Well, I mean, I used to. And, I guess, he used to. Too.”

“Then try showing him a little heart. He wouldn’t do this to you.”

“How could he? He’s not an auditor,” I said. “And he did publicly post the notification.”

“You started it by sending that letter.”

“But that was computer generated.”

“A real personal touch. That’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t do. He’s a good person, which is more than I can say about you. You’re not even good enough to be rummaging through his financial records.” She hung up.

Not good enough? I thought. How the hell could she know that? Who the hell was she to judge? Not good enough? At least I didn’t prank call strangers. At least I didn’t harass honest government workers. I was plenty good enough, I told myself. And besides, shouldn’t that be Jonah Gray’s choice?

As soon as the question popped into my mind, I sat up with a start. What was I doing? How had I become so riled from an anonymous phone call? That woman didn’t know me. None of them knew me. And it wasn’t for any of them to judge whether or not I was good enough to audit Mr. Jonah Gray. Ultimately, it wasn’t even his choice. It was the IRS that had chosen. And apparently the Service, or its randomization algorithm, had chosen me.

I realized that I had stopped reviewing Jonah Gray’s return in my standard way. Instead of following my long-held protocols, I was wandering around this guy’s life like a lost soul, skimming forward and backward without any plan at all. Gone was my customary patience—I was acting as if I wanted to know everything all at once, which is exactly how I felt.

But that’s not how an auditor was supposed to approach a return. It was not the way I’d been trained to work. I was supposed to review all returns in the same manner, to give them equal, undifferentiated consideration.

I steeled myself and closed his file. Yes, this guy was unexpected, and I didn’t know what I would find next, and I wanted to know. But I wasn’t going to abandon my professionalism for the sake of some stranger. I would unravel Jonah Gray’s story in due time. But I would start over from the beginning, the standard way. That is, once I got the first page back from Ricardo.

When Ricardo finally reappeared, he was dripping from head to toe. The man couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, which he was when he walked back into my cubicle.

“You left with my return. I need it,” I said.

“Look at me!” Ricardo shrieked, as the carpet below his feet grew sodden and dark. “They’re replacing old water pipes up on five,” he said. He flipped his hair back and liquid spattered across my desk. “One of them burst before they got the water turned off. I walked in and got hosed.”

“And my return?” I asked again.

“I could have been hurt!”

“But you’re not.”

“I should have gone to Susan for sympathy,” he said. He held out a matted, dripping clot of paper. IRS forms are essentially newsprint, and they don’t hold up under liquid.

“My God, Ricardo!” I said, grabbing the paper. It ripped as I took it from him. It began to come apart in my hands.

“I was holding it and then, well, couldn’t you hear? I had to protect myself.”

“With a piece of paper?” I spread the remains out on my desk. Half of the page had either been pulled off or had disintegrated. It was hard to tell which.

“Everyone knows that newsprint is just a weak mix of waste-paper pulps. You can’t expect it to maintain any tensile strength when wet. The fibers are way too short.”

Ricardo blinked at me, water still dripping off of him. “Not everyone knows that. Just geeks like you. Believe it or not, that isn’t what went through my mind when the pipe exploded.”

“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

“I’m not going back up there,” Ricardo said.

The soggy remains on my desk looked like the beginnings of an unpromising papier-mâché effort. And I had a sinking feeling that I was in possession of the healthiest remnant. “That was the original. I’m going to have to request a replacement.”

“So call Mr. Bean Man. Mr. Funny Dead Chickens.”

“And tell him what?”

Ricardo shrugged. “I don’t know. Mention the tensile strength of newsprint. What man wouldn’t swoon?”

Chapter Six

WHEN I WAS FIVE AND KURT WAS EIGHT, OUR FAMILY moved from the outskirts of Roanoke, Virginia, to Piedmont, California. That was back before Blake, back when “family” meant just four of us—Mom, Dad, Kurt and me. Leaving Virginia was a huge deal. My father’s family had been there for six generations, and Dad had planned to follow suit and put down roots, his and ours, in the Old Dominion after finishing his accounting degree at the university in Charlottesville.

My mother, on the other hand, was from California. She’d gone east on scholarship to Sweet Briar, which she left after three years in order to be by my father’s side at the outset of his career. In the earliest years of their marriage, my mother had agreed to adopt Virginia as her own. But during the winter I turned five, the plan changed. I have this vivid memory of Kurt walking me home from kindergarten, the door to our house swinging open, the hallway inside stacked with boxes—giant cardboard containers, some taller than I was, kraft brown and sturdy. They were the sort of boxes you might lose yourself inside, the perfect makings for a clubhouse or tunneled fort. But as soon as my mother came around the corner, I saw something in the crimp of her mouth, and I knew without a word spoken that those boxes weren’t for play. Two weeks later, we lived in California.

My mother had insisted on the move, explaining to us that kids in California were nicer than kids in Virginia. I was five. How would I know? Soon enough, though, I would realize that our cross-country move had more to do with turbulence in my parents’ marriage. My father had been given a choice: Virginia or his wife and kids.

Sometimes I wondered what would have happened had he stayed behind, but I guess I’m glad he chose us, packing things up and shuttering his fledgling accountancy. He even found a house in Piedmont, a town my mother had long loved, though it was a stretch for them financially. And instead of growing up in Virginia, I became a girl from California, which brings with it a different set of expectations.

A part of me had always sensed that I’d missed out on something to have left Virginia so early. My scattered memories of the place were consistently tinged with the green of its thick, hot summers, its dense forests and its slow, fishy river. My recollections of the move itself are hazy, a pastiche of unrelated images, like puzzle pieces from opposite corners. The purple flower and the blue bird may be part of the same puzzle, but they don’t fit easily together. A long plane ride. Kurt crying. Untouched trays of food left outside a hotel-room door. Neighbors that smelled of cigarettes. My old sheets on a new bed.

Three years older, Kurt probably remembered that stretch of time better than I did, but he didn’t like to talk about it, except to say how scared he’d been to restart third grade in a new school of strangers, even if Mom had promised that they’d be nicer. I didn’t notice that they were any nicer than the kids back in Roanoke.

My parents lived in that first Piedmont house for a few years, then moved to a bigger one, and eventually landed in the four-bedroom traditional on Banner Hill, where I spent my middle and high-school years. Each time we moved, my father would grouse for months about costs and bills and how the hell was he expected to afford it, what with pottery lessons and soccer uniforms and college tuitions for two and then three kids. But my mother had grown up knowing want (her family was from Hayward, down the east bay between nothing and nowhere). As a child, she had dreamed of living in a house with a three-car garage and a pool in Piedmont, a tony little town totally surrounded by the much larger city of Oakland. The Banner Hill house had both the garage and the pool. It was where she felt she had been meant to live, where she deserved to live. And it was where my parents would celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary.

I arrived at the house at the same time as the Maselins, long-time neighbors from down the block. Mrs. Maselin I barely knew. She was painfully shy and seemed rarely to speak. Their son, Brian, was nice enough and had been friends with Kurt since both boys had been in their teens. And then there was Mr. Maselin.

My own father wasn’t easy to get along with, often coming across as aloof and angry at the same time. But at least he didn’t hit on every woman in a thirty-foot radius. That was Mr. Maselin’s calling card, as was his reference, usually within the first minute of conversation, to whatever he’d most recently acquired—the biggest car on the block, the loudest stereo, the longest wet bar. He was a man of unwelcome superlatives.

I didn’t know whether he had ever actually been unfaithful to his wife, Ellen, but he acted as though he wanted to be and as though he would be, should the opportunity present itself. I didn’t like feeling that he was constantly seeking an opportunity. And I’d always hated the way his eyes combed over my mother.

The Maselins had pulled up to my parents’ house just before I did. They lived four houses down, but they had driven to the party. If I followed them through the front door, I knew I would have to smile politely and hear what new gadget Ian had just bought. Instead, I wound past the side of the garage, back toward the pool. Maybe I couldn’t avoid an exchange of pleasantries with Ian Maselin, but I could down a drink first.

My mother had spent months planning the anniversary party, meaning that she paid a party planner and remained available to make hard choices like, yes Stilton, no Muenster. From the looks of the place, the planner had earned her money. In the light of tiki torches, the back patio was washed a golden magical. Someone had trimmed the hedges and scrubbed down the deck. Fresh flowers floated across the pool. There were two bars and three bartenders and a good-looking wait-staff circulated with trays of buttery treats in puffs and crusts.

I grabbed a beer and gazed around the patio, trying to spot Kurt or Blake or Uncle Ed, my mother’s older brother. Instead my eyes landed on my ex-boyfriend Gene. Before he could see me, I ducked inside the house and tracked my mother’s voice to the kitchen.

“Gene’s here,” I said.

She looked up from where she stood, hovering over a caterer as he tried to arrange a tray of fruit and cheese. “Sasha! You made it. And don’t you look, well, androgynously festive!” She held out her hand and gave me a squeeze.

My mother was wearing the diamond necklace my father had given her for their thirtieth anniversary and the diamond bracelet she had bought for herself “just because.” I’d never before seen the outfit she wore, but no doubt it was the finest of several she had acquired for the occasion.

I chose to ignore her comment. “Gene’s here,” I said again.

“How lovely. I’ll have to come out and say hello. Why don’t you put some more cheddar on that one,” she told the caterer. “Orange is such a nice summery color.”

I knew a fake smile when I saw one, and the caterer’s smile to my mother was just that.

“You didn’t tell me he was going to be here,” I said, trying to get her to focus on something other than cheese. I wasn’t sure whether I was more frustrated that she had invited Gene or that I hadn’t foreseen as much. I should have known; “I didn’t realize you’d mind” was one of her set pieces.

“I wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it.”

“That’s not the point,” I told her. “I told you that we broke up.”

My mother put on her sad face. “So I’m not allowed to see my friend Gene anymore?”

“He’s not your friend—he’s your mailman. And it’s not that you can’t see him. Just, a little warning would have been nice.”

“He’s your mailman now,” my mother reminded me.

It was true, but that was not the point either. Gene had originally worked my parents’ route, which is how my mother had met him. She had found him appealing, in a reliable, rain-sleet-snow sort of way, and over a series of brief conversations, she had ascertained that he was both single and straight. Based solely on these two traits, she had deemed him a perfect life partner for her only daughter.

Gene had transferred to Oakland just before we’d started dating, to a route that included my house. I didn’t consider my neighborhood anything special, but Gene had grown up around there, and he’d been angling to get back to familiar sidewalks from the moment he’d joined the postal service.

I’ll give him credit—for all the ways he’d irked me while we’d dated, I’d never enjoyed such consistent and timely mail delivery. And I knew that it wouldn’t change, even now that we were no longer together. Gene wasn’t vindictive in the least, and he took pride in the quality of his work. In a way, he was perfect. As a mailman.

“Is he going to make you uncomfortable, sweetheart? Do you want me to go out there and ask him to leave?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t have invited him if I’d known.”

I doubted this, but the fact was it wasn’t my evening to whine.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said.

“That’s exactly what I thought!” My mother smiled brightly before turning back to the caterer. “What about grapes? People like grapes.”

“We could do grapes if you want,” he said. He looked tired.

“Here, Mom,” I said, taking her by the elbow. “Why don’t you let the professionals do that.”

“I’m just trying to help. Scott,” she said, turning to the caterer. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

“I’m sure Scott agrees that you should be out enjoying your party,” I said. “Did you see that the Maselins were here?”

My mother must have already been on her way to another thought. When she answered, her voice sounded far off. “Oh, really,” she said. “I should say hello.”

“Thanks for that,” Scott said after she left. He gave me a smile that I liked to think looked less forced.

“She means well.” I picked a grape off the platter and popped it into my mouth. “At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

I returned to the patio and found Gene by the pool.

“Hey there, stranger,” I said. I’d avoided saying hi to him ever since he’d told me that had been a joke in intermediate school. All the kids coming up, saying “Hi Gene,” thinking they were so clever.

“Why, hello Sasha.” He was always so polite, an otherwise inoffensive trait that had grown to annoy me. It was as if I’d become allergic to everything about him. You break up with someone, and then, maybe to prove to yourself that it was the right thing to do, you find all the ways that the person was wrong for you, wrong for your life or just plain wrong.

“You look as lovely as ever,” Gene said.

“My mother just used the word androgynous.”

“She must have been making a joke.”

“She says sometimes she forgets that she doesn’t have three sons,” I added.

“That Lola is a funny one,” Gene said. He gazed at me with that way of his, the one that made me want to run screaming. He was so gentle. So sweet. So nothing.

“So how’ve you been?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Gene since we’d called it quits. To be precise, I’d called it quits. To be totally precise—Jeff-Hill precise—I had seen him a couple times as he’d delivered my mail, but I’d stayed hidden behind a window shade.

It’s not as if he would have ripped up my catalogs had he seen me, but it seemed easier to avoid eye contact. Maybe I hadn’t quite filed away my feelings for him, even though I didn’t have any use for them anymore.

“I’ve been just fine,” he said. “Work always slows a little in August.”

I nodded. Most things slowed in August. Only the IRS revved up.

“Are you here with anybody?” I asked him.

“No!” he croaked, clearly appalled.

It was a silly question. Bringing a date to my parents’ party was the sort of provocation Gene would never have undertaken.

“You seeing anyone?” I asked. I didn’t want him back, but I still wanted to know.

“No,” he said, with a sad sort of half smile. “One of the other carriers has been trying to set me up with his sister.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know. It seems like so much trouble to go to.”

“Have you met her?”

He shook his head, then he shrugged. “I’m not comfortable having this conversation with you,” he said.

I nodded. Why did I still need to know every little detail? I had been the breaker-upper—I didn’t get to know everything anymore. But even now, he made it easy for me.

“So how’s your father?” he asked.

“Fine, I think. His doctor said it looks like a full remission.”

“I saw him when I came in. He’s gained some weight back,” Gene said. “He looks good.”

In my job, I heard a lot of people lie. There’s a tone to it, an airiness, a carefully constructed casualness. I heard the same in Gene’s voice. “But?” “What?” Gene asked.

“It sounded like you were going to say something else.”

He paused. “No,” he finally said. “You know, I never got to know him very well.”

“You got off easy,” I said. “But speaking of the guest of honor, I see him over there. I haven’t said hello yet.”

“You should go,” Gene said, nodding.

I was suddenly grateful that he’d made it so easy, as if he really did want the best for me. I felt my stomach sour a little. Why couldn’t I just be nice to the guy?

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

My father looked up and lumbered a step closer. “So you made it,” he said.

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed this.” I was surprised that he thought I might not have come.

He leaned in for a quick hug and then pushed away, throwing me off balance. My father had always hugged abruptly, as if physical proximity were a reflex which, on second thought, he wasn’t comfortable with. I don’t know why I still wasn’t ready for it.

Though I lived only five miles away, it had been about a month since I’d seen him last. That wasn’t an accident. My father and I had hit a rough patch right around the time I took the IRS job, and we’d been skidding for about six years. Back when I was twenty-five and had passed my CPA exam, he’d wanted me to join his accountancy. At least, that’s what my mother had said. He’d never actually offered me a job, except to mention that if I ever worked with him, I couldn’t expect a handout, and I would need to generate my own clientele and find office space. It hadn’t been a terribly compelling pitch, and instead, I’d accepted the IRS’s offer.

Ever since, he’d seemed a little angry with me. I could tell by the way he asked about my work, on those very rare times he deigned to broach the subject, that he didn’t respect it, and so I’d stopped offering. I figured that he didn’t talk to me about his clientele because he thought I might audit them, and frankly, I couldn’t have promised not to. You get a lead and you’re obligated to follow it. Either way, as the years passed, we seemed to have less and less to talk about. He found the energy to talk to Kurt about geology and to Blake about various school subjects—things he knew precious little about. But with me, the child who worked in the same field as him, my father drew a blank.

Maybe I wasn’t the daughter he’d wanted. Or maybe that’s just the natural order of things. It’s an old song: children grow up, become adults, develop their own friends, buy their own houses, and in so doing, spend less time with their parents. It’s not as if my parents were suffering. My mother kept my father busy with shopping trips and golf outings and visits to the wine country and to the condo in Tahoe. It just meant that I didn’t see him very often. At least, I told myself that’s all it was.

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