The Auditor's Chaos

Edmund Prickett was thirty-eight years old, and he believed in Tuesday. Not the day, exactly, though he did like the day, but the principle of it. The principle that a week should have a shape and that shape should repeat. He woke at 6:15. He ate the same oatmeal with the same twelve raisins, counted out, because why guess when you could know? He drove a gray Corolla to City Hall, where he was a municipal compliance auditor, and he audited compliance, and then he drove home, and the whole thing held together like a well-filed binder.

Was that boring? People kept asking him that, with a little smirk, like they'd caught him. Edmund didn't think so. Boring was a word lucky people used. Predictability was a virtue. A man who knew what next Tuesday held was a man who never got a phone call that ruined him. He had structured his entire adult life around the idea that nothing should surprise him, and for nearly four decades, nothing had.

His coworker Stanley, forty-one, deadpan as a filing cabinet, once asked him over lunch, "Don't you ever want anything to just, I don't know, happen?"

"Things happen," Edmund said. "Last quarter a permit office used the wrong font on a public notice. Happened. I documented it."

"That's not happening, that's paperwork."

"Paperwork is how civilization says it loves you," Edmund said, and Stanley just looked at his sandwich.

And then, on an ordinary Thursday in March, the phone call came. Not to him, first. To Marlene, the administrator, fifty-six, a sweet flustered woman who had worked at City Hall since before Edmund owned a suit with elbows. She came to his desk wringing a printout like it was a live fish.

"Edmund! Oh, Edmund, dear, there's a, it's a complaint, you see, against the, oh dear."

"Take a breath, Marlene."

"There's a complaint against you!" she burst out. "From Voss & Vinegar! The pickle truck."

Edmund knew the pickle truck. Everyone knew the pickle truck. It belonged to Delia Voss, thirty-four, an artisanal pickle entrepreneur who operated a food truck called Voss & Vinegar, and who had, in Edmund's professional opinion, the worst relationship with municipal code of any business owner in the county. She parked where food trucks did not park. She displayed signage that food trucks did not display. She had once, per the file, installed a chalkboard sandwich menu on a public tree. He had cited her eleven times. She had hugged him after citation number four, which was itself probably a violation of something.

The complaint said he had conducted his inspections of her operation with, and Edmund read this twice, "excessive personal enthusiasm and punitive relish." Which was ridiculous. He was not enthusiastic. He was thorough. But Delia Voss had filed a formal grievance, and then she had shown up at the hearing in a cork hat, and then somebody on the review board had laughed at the phrase "punitive relish" out loud, and then somehow, in a chain of events Edmund could never fully reconstruct, he was being let go. Not fired, Marlene kept insisting. "Restructured. Out. Oh dear."

He carried his box to the gray Corolla. In the box: a stapler, a mug that said WORLD'S MOST ADEQUATE AUDITOR (a gift from Stanley), and a folder of his own personal copies of citations, which he supposed were now just paper.

He did not go home. He drove, without a plan, which for Edmund was like swimming without water, and he ended up on the east side, past the last strip mall, where the road turned to gravel, and there it was. An abandoned building. Two stories, brick, sitting in a field of knee-high grass like it had been left there by someone in a hurry. A sign on the fence said the property had been in a probate dispute since before anyone could remember and was, quote, NOT FOR SALE OR TRESPASSING, which Edmund found contradictory.

He should have driven away. Instead he got out. He was, technically, unemployed, and therefore technically not on the clock, and therefore technically nothing he did for the next hour counted. It was the freest he had felt in years, and he hated how much he liked it.

The side door was not locked. Of course it wasn't. Inside, dust hung in the light from boarded windows, and the floor creaked, and Edmund found himself smiling, which his face did so rarely that it felt like pulling a muscle.

"You're not the county man, are you?"

Edmund nearly dropped the folder. A voice, coming from a doorway. A woman, mid-sixties at least, in a quilted vest, holding a flashlight like she'd been waiting years for someone to point it at.

"The county man comes Tuesdays," she said. "You're not Tuesday. Who are you?"

"Edmund. Prickett. Formerly of City Hall."

"Formerly. Good. The county man is a menace. I'm Ada. I live in the trailer out back. I've been watching this building for eleven years, ever since old Hutter died in it, and I'll tell you now, if you're here to knock it down, I'll set the trailer on your car."

"I'm not here to knock it down," Edmund said. "I don't even know what it is."

"It's the old Hutter Hall," Ada said, like everyone knew. "Hutter ran it as a dance hall, then a grange hall, then a storage place for, well, nobody ever found out what all he stored. Man was a pack rat with a padlock. Building's sat empty since, oh, when did he die, 2013? Fourteen? Somewhere in there. Probate's been stuck ever since because his heirs hate each other more than they want money. You could stand in it for free for a decade and nobody would come."

Which, Ada later admitted, was exactly what Edmund proceeded to do.

He came back the next day. And the next. He told himself it was research. He had, after all, just been restructured out of a job, and a man with a folder and no folder to fill was a danger to himself. He wrote up the building the way he'd write up any property: deficiencies noted, code sections cited. There were so many deficiencies that the write-up became a hobby and then a project and then, by the second week, a calling. The stairs didn't meet riser code. The exits didn't have exits. There was wiring in the walls that appeared to predate the invention of electricity, or at least the invention of having an electrician.

"The breaker panel is a fire hazard inside a fire hazard," he told Ada, pointing. "That's a junction box wired into a junction box. That's not a system, that's a rumor of a system."

"Hutter did his own work," Ada said fondly. "Saved money. Also he was cheap, and also possibly insane."

"So I'd have to gut it. All of it."

"You're talking like you're fixing it up," Ada said, and narrowed her eyes. "Are you fixing it up?"

Edmund opened his mouth to say no, and found that no was not what came out. "I have savings," he said. "Nineteen months of savings, calculated. And I have no job. And this building fails forty-one distinct code provisions, and I know every one of them by number."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's said on this property since Hutter," Ada said.

It was in the fifth week, tearing out the wall between the old dance floor and what Hutter had probably called the coat room, that Edmund found it. He'd pried off a section of lathe and plaster, expecting the usual, dust, dead flies, a 1970s beer can, and instead his crowbar hit something with a thunk that was not a thunk of nothing. A cavity. A hidden cavity, behind a loose board, and inside it, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with string, a small tin box. He sat down on the dusty floor with it in his lap. Ada's flashlight, borrowed, shook a little in his hand.

"Ada," he called through the wall. "Ada, come in here. There's something in the walls."

There was a pause. Then her boots came quick across the boards.

"Don't open it out here," she said, dropping to her knees beside him. "Well, no, open it. Open it, open it, what is it?"

Edmund cut the string. The oilcloth came away, and underneath was a tin, rusted at the corners, and inside the tin were papers. Lots of papers. Neat, folded, numbered papers, and on the top sheet, in a hand so precise it could only belong to a man who did his own wiring, the words: HALL LEDGER AND OTHER MATTERS. DO NOT DISCARD. H.

Edmund did what any reasonable man would do with a tin of papers labeled DO NOT DISCARD. He made a spreadsheet.

"That's not reasonable," Ada said, watching him lay the pages out on a folding table in rows. "That's the opposite of reasonable."

"It's indexing," Edmund said. "Every document gets a number, a date, and a category."

"You found a dead man's secret papers in a wall and your first instinct was formatting?"

"Category, Ada. It's called a category."

The papers turned out to be a ledger, all right, but not a ledger of money. It was a ledger of events. Hutter had written down every dance, every grange meeting, every wedding, every fight, every flood, every time somebody's truck got