The Return of Jonah Gray Read Free

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
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    â€œI guess you see all types,” he finally said.
    â€œAll 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.
    â€œTwo guys scared off in record time,” Martina said. “That was fast, even for you.”
    â€œI didn’t scare them off,” I said.
    â€œRight. It must have been me,” Martina said. “Didn’t that Kevin have a nice smile?”
    â€œContractor,” 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.”
    â€œThat’s not always true.”
    â€œOkay. Guys skip girls who can assess penalties with interest.”
    I conceded the point.
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAre you okay?” he asked, after knocking on the door.
    â€œSure. Why?” I asked back, looking up from a box of pens.
    â€œUh, because you’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes.”
    â€œOh please.”
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œThinking, I guess.” I hadn’t realized it had been twenty minutes.
    â€œThinking? In here? About what?”
    I decided to be honest about where my mind had been.