The Return of Jonah Gray (6 page)

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.