The Return Of Jonah Gray. Heather Cochran

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ