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“But—” I tried to cut in.
“You make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?
“Sir—” I tried again.
“All you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.
I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.
“That is not a happy face.”
At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.
“I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”
“We have a question,” Susan said.
“Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.
“Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”
“Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”
“Paper?” Susan asked.
“Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.
“And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.
I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”
Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.
“Fine. You win,” she said.
“Win what?” I asked.
“I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”
“Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”
“I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.
“Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Ricardo started to laugh.
I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.
“Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”
“Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.
I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.
I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.
“I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.
“Resident warehouse,” I muttered.
“You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.
“Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.
But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered.
“Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you have some nerve.”
“Do you?” I’d never considered myself particularly brave.
She didn’t answer. She just kept barreling on. “You’re harassing one of the best people I’ve ever known. If you’d only take the time to know him, to talk to him, you’d see.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked, understanding at once the sort of nerve she’d meant. My cheeks started burning. “Who is this?”
“But no, you have to drop your poison into his life. Now, I don’t know what sort of a family you were raised in, Ms. Gardner, but I hope you take a good look at how you’re spending your time on God’s green earth and move on to better things. He’s had a hard enough year. Look at all he gave up. And for what? To have you bothering him? How about planting some happiness for a change and letting go that misery you sow?”
“Who are you?” I asked again. “How did you get my name? Do you know Gordon?”
“I’m a concerned citizen who felt an obligation to tell you that you work for the worst branch of our government.”
“The IRS isn’t its own branch,” I said. “We’re a part of the Treasury which is a part of…” She had hung up. “Never mind.”
I replaced the handset. In my previous six years at the service, I hadn’t received even one complaint. Now two in one afternoon? I looked around my office for clues. I listened for Cliff’s voice, wondering whether he was receiving the same phone-line vitriol. How could I defend myself when I didn’t know what I’d done, or to whom I’d done it? Who was this “he” that both callers had referred to?
I was so flustered that when my phone rang again, I barked into it. “I know—I’m awful. There, I beat you to it, didn’t I? Surprised?”
“Uh, this is Jody in reception. Your three o’clock appointment is here.”
“Oh. Sure, Jody. I’ll be right there.”
I had to get it together. I took a deep breath and glanced at my watch. That made me smile and, at least briefly, forget the phone calls. It was three o’clock exactly. They were right on time.
I had predicted by the way they prepaid their bills that the Ritters would be punctual. I had a clear-cut image of them in my mind: Donald Ritter, the avuncular former radio-station manager, his stomach straining against the spongy weave of a golf shirt, his all-purpose, slip-on sneakers, and Miriam, who’d only started to work that year, half time at a children’s clothing store. She would get her hair set every week, was a crossword fanatic and probably carried her knitting in a public-radio tote.
I didn’t know if the image I had built would be accurate, of course. I was never sure before I got an auditee into my cubicle. But I enjoyed the puzzle immensely, as well as the interim between the moment I wasn’t sure and seconds later, when I was. Imagine a life. Have you got it? I mean, have you really got it? Well then, let’s raise the curtain and bring out Donald and Miriam.
I walked into our no-frills reception area and looked around. Three sets of folks were waiting. One guy, off the bat I knew he was way too slick. He wore a perfectly tailored suit and crocodile loafers. My folks, the Ritters, they were savers. They weren’t wealthy, but I reckoned they’d been saving ten percent of Don’s take-home for the past twenty years. The guy in the suit—he’d dropped some serious cash (or more likely, credit) on his threads.
And anyhow, the crocodile man had an oily, better-than-you-are air. Donald and Miriam were softer than that, more hamburgers and horseshoes. The year before, they had donated an old car to a children’s hospital and hadn’t even claimed full value.
The folks by the door were too young. I knew that the Ritters had recently moved into a senior-living community, and both members of a couple usually had to have passed fifty-five to buy into such a development. Call me a warehouse, but that was the obscure sort of rule I got paid to keep track of.
“Ritter,” I called out, looking directly at the couple I had pegged as Donald and Miriam.
They stood. Tote bag and slip-on sneakers. I loved being right.
“I’m Sasha Gardner,” I told them. “Would you follow me, please?”
They looked unhappy to see me. I got no joy from ruining their day, but you can’t complete an audit without a face-to-face interview. It gives people a chance to explain themselves. Auditing might sound formulaic, but even I’d been surprised a few times. Sometimes, I would think I had someone pegged as an evader, and she’d arrive with a God’s honest explanation about the terrible year she’d had (and that’s why her numbers had gone all to hell). Other times, a taxpayer I thought I would surely let off would sit down and start lying through his teeth, even about the legit stuff. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.
“Here we are, Mr. Ritter, Mrs. Ritter,” I said when we arrived at my cubicle.
“Call me Mitzi.” As she folded up the newspaper she’d been holding, I could have sworn I caught sight of a crossword.
“Mitzi, then,” I agreed. “Have a seat.”
I noticed her staring hard at me. “You’re so young,” Mitzi Ritter finally said. She turned to her husband. “This girl can’t be older than Molly.” She turned back to me. “You’re not, are you?”
“Molly?” I asked.
“Our daughter,” Mitzi said. “You don’t know that? They said you’d know everything about us.”
“They?”
“Our new neighbors got audited once,” Don Ritter said. “Everybody has an opinion.”
“I don’t know everything,” I said. “But we don’t mind the rumor if it keeps people honest.” I smiled at Don Ritter to try to put him at ease.
He didn’t smile back.
I had assumed that the Ritters had kids by the size of their former house. “I take it Molly’s not a dependent anymore,” I said.
“Oh no. She’s been out of the house since, gosh how long has it been, Don?”
“Ten years,” Don said.
“Has it been that long?”
“She’ll be twenty-eight come December.”
“Time sure flies,” Mitzi clucked, then turned to look at me. “How old are you?”
I saw Don Ritter roll his eyes.
“Is that rude?” Mitzi asked. “It’s only because you look so young.”
“You think everyone looks young,” Don said.
“I’m thirty-one,” I told them.
“So young,” Mitzi said.
“So listen, Mr. and Mrs. Ritter. I mean, Mitzi. I imagine you weren’t exactly thrilled to receive my notice of your audit.”
Mitzi looked at her husband, who frowned, sitting a little higher in his chair and pulling his golf shirt down over his belly. Mitzi tried a smile. “There was a bit of language. I won’t repeat it here.”
“I know how you feel,” I said.
“Have you been audited, too?” she asked, eyes wide. “They do that?”
“Actually, no. Yes, they do audit auditors. I haven’t been tagged yet though.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like,” Don said.
“Well, my father’s a certified public accountant, and my mother is a busybody. I kind of view my childhood as a series of unwelcome investigations.”
“I suppose it could have been worse,” Don Ritter said. “At least we’ve still got our health.”
“That’s a blessing,” Mitzi agreed. “Can’t take that for granted.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. Indeed, it was a subject I could have spoken about at length. Deep down, I knew it was the reason behind my current distraction. But other audits were waiting, piled high upon my table. I smiled at the Ritters. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
Chapter Three
THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, I COULD HEAR MY phone ringing. I was just getting home, jacket and book in one hand and mail tucked under my arm, digging through my purse to find my keys. I hated that. A ringing phone and my response was practically Pavlovian. My heartbeat would quicken, and I’d bolt into over-drive, rushing, trying to shove my key in the lock, tripping over my purse, skittering across the room, and what were the chances it would actually be someone I wanted to talk to? Nine times out of ten, my desperate lunge got me to the phone in time for a sales call. Or, as on that day, my mother. And I’d been in such a fine mood leaving work.
“You sound like you’re out of breath,” she said. “You’re not getting enough exercise, are you?”
“I just got home,” I told her, picking up my purse, my mail, my jacket, my accounting book. Disappointed for some reason. Who did I expect that elusive tenth caller to be? Who would be worth the lunge and the scattered mail and the bent book jacket? No one sprang to mind.
“You work too hard,” my mother said.
“It’s not even six yet.”
“Long and hard aren’t the same thing.” My mother had held a part-time job for about six months, twenty-six years earlier. Apparently, it had given her a lifetime of insight.
“Were you calling about something in particular?”
She sighed. “I was just thinking about you and Gene.”
I looked at my mail and frowned. “What about Gene?”
“I want you to be happy, sweetheart. Are you happy?”
I had been before I’d answered the phone, I thought. There had been no more blistering phone calls, and the Ritters’ audit had gone well. In my analysis, I’d discovered that they hadn’t taken the full deduction on the appreciation of their former house (at issue was an upgraded bathroom), so I had sent them away with a refund. They were so surprised and relieved that they had invited me to a barbecue at their house that coming Labor Day. Of course, I wouldn’t go. Auditors never got involved with current or past auditees, not outside the office. It was important to remain impartial.
