The Return of Jonah Gray (5 page)

“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.

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.