The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  “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  I watched Ricardo give Jeff a quick once-over, his eyes pulling to a stop on the new hire’s outdated loafers.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 c
ubicle 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.”