Two Against the Odds

by Joan Kilby

  “As a teacher with a fixed income, preparing a statement was easy. Since I quit my regular job I haven’t figured out all the ins and outs of what I need to do as a self-employed artist.”

  “So you’ve simply ignored the problem, hoping it will go away.” Rafe wrote a few lines in his notebook.

  “In a nutshell.” She glanced out the window, calculating the angle of the light slanting through the trees onto her detached studio. She’d hoped to have meditated her way into a creative state and be working by now. Instead, she was stuck here, talking to a tax agent. “How much time will the audit take?”

  “That depends,” he said. “If your records are in order and easily accessible it could take only a few days.”

  “Records?” Her fingers pleated the soft fabric of her skirt. She hadn’t been able to find her “filing system” for over a month.

  “Tax receipts. As in, when you purchase paints and canvases you keep a receipt.” His dark eyes bored into her. “You do keep your receipts, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I save everything in big manila envelopes.”

  “I’d like you to get them for me, please. Everything for the past five years. Plus bank statements, utility bills, home and contents insurance, et cetera.”

  “I would but there’s a small problem. I put the envelopes away for safekeeping and now I can’t find them.” When his black eyebrows pulled together, she added quickly, “Oh, don’t worry. I never throw anything away.” As anyone could guess just by looking at her house.

  “What have you been doing with your receipts since then?” he asked.

  “They’re around,” she said vaguely. Tossed in a drawer, tucked inside a novel as a bookmark, stuffed into a shoe box.

  “You’ll need to locate them and the envelopes, of course.” He glanced about the room. “Where can I set up my laptop? Is there a table or desk I can use as a workspace?”

  “Um…” The coffee table, an old trunk she’d painted white, was covered in assorted debris—a used teacup, her sketch pad and box of charcoal and cat toys. The side table at his elbow was obscured by seashells and pretty stones she’d found on the beach. The dining table was strewn with magazines, newspapers and junk mail. And a framed seascape ready to be delivered to the local Manyung Gallery, where she sold works on commission.

  “I guess the dining table.” She got up and placed the painting on the floor, leaning it against the wall.

  Rafe set his briefcase on the table in the space cleared and removed a laptop. Lexie moved around him, gathering the newspapers and magazines. She was aware of how tall he was, at least a head higher than her. And he smelled good, spicy and warm. He was emitting enough pheromones to set her blood humming again.

  “Perhaps you have a computer spreadsheet detailing items purchased and the dates?” he asked. “I’d still need the receipts, of course, for verification.”

  “No spreadsheet,” Lexie said. “My sister, Renita, is a loans officer at the bank. She tried to organize a bookkeeping system for me but I couldn’t be bothered filling in all those columns.”

  He turned his incredulous gaze on her. “Did you read the letter my boss sent you a month ago? Or any of his emails?”

  Shaking her head, she took a step back. Pheromones or no, she didn’t like an inquisition.

  “Did you listen to the messages on your answering machine, at least?”

  She rubbed at a spot of Crimson Lake paint on her knuckle. “I did. But when I’m working I tend to tune things out.”

  “Tune out?” It all seemed too much for Rafe. With a grimace, he pressed a hand to his abdomen.

  “Is your stomach bothering you?”

  “It’ll pass.” His voice was tight, his shoulders slightly hunched.

  “Is it an ulcer? My uncle had an ulcer.”

  “I’m fine.” He lowered himself onto the chair in front of his laptop, the lines of his face pulled taut.

  “I’ll make you a cup of peppermint tea.” Before he could object she strode out of the dining room into the adjacent kitchen. She filled the kettle at the sink. Crystals hanging in the window cast rainbows over her arms. People sometimes got exasperated with her for being scatterbrained, but she didn’t think she’d ever actually made anyone physically ill before.

  “My stomach would feel better if you got me your records,” he called.

  “I’m working on that.” While the water heated she looked in the cupboard beneath the telephone where she stored cookbooks. Not surprisingly, there weren’t a dozen large envelopes stuffed with receipts and tax invoices. Where had she put those things?

  Ah, but here was a receipt for mat board that she’d bought last week. It was tucked inside the address book. Of course. Because she’d rung the gallery right after buying the materials for framing.

  Sitting on the tiled floor, she pulled out cookbooks and riffled through the pages. She found a few grocery store receipts itemizing pitifully meager provisions.

  “Can I claim food?” she yelled to the other room.

  “No, it’s not a deductible business expense.” Already he sounded long-suffering and he’d been here less than an hour.

  She was putting back her mother’s copy of Joy of Cooking, which she’d borrowed to make quince preserves, when an old photograph fell out of the pages. With paint-stained fingers she slanted it toward the light.

  She, her brother, Jack, and sister, Renita, were playing on the front lawn of the dairy farm where they’d grown up. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. Jack would have been about four and Renita just a toddler. Lexie smiled, her eyes misting. They’d had good times as kids.

  Now Jack was getting married again and Renita, too. Lexie was the only one of her siblings who hadn’t found a life partner. She’d never had the kids she longed for, either. A sharp pang for the baby she’d lost made her press a hand to her chest. She counted back the years.

  Her boy would have been twenty-one years old now.

  “The kettle is boiling,” Rafe said, right behind her.

  Lexie tucked the photograph back in the cookbook and, rising, placed the mat board receipt in his open palm. “It’s a start.”

  He stared at the crumpled slip of paper. Resignation washed over his face and his mouth firmed. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up over his forearms. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “You have no idea,” Lexie murmured.

  RAFE TOOK a sip of peppermint tea and tried not to grimace. He would give his right arm for a strong cup of espresso—even if it did aggravate his gut. Carefully he set the delicate china teacup with the hand-painted roses in its saucer.

  With Lexie’s records this disorganized he bet she had other undeclared painting sales. How was she going to pay her taxes? Anyone could see she had no money.

  Not his problem. His job was to do the audit and get the hell out of Summerside.

  Hopefully after he’d had a chance to sample the fishing.

  Seated at the dining table, he went about setting up a spreadsheet for Lexie’s tax records. So far she’d managed to find a dozen receipts, gleaned from strange hiding places. The teapot had yielded a receipt for scented tea candles—naturally. Apparently Lexie sometimes meditated by candlelight to enhance her creativity. Too bad for her, the tax office didn’t consider them an allowable expense.

  Lexie was moving around the living room, searching in decorative wooden boxes and flipping through the pages of books. Never in his six years of auditing had he come across anyone like her. She’d pick something up, carry it a few steps and put it down in another spot.

  Nutbags, these artist types.

  “Maybe instead of looking for individual receipts, you should concentrate on finding those envelopes you were telling me about,” he said.

  “I’m deliberately not thinking about them in the hopes it’ll pop into my mind where I put them.”

  Nutbag she might be, but she was easy on the eyes. With her straight back and graceful, sleek limbs she coul
d have been mistaken for a dancer. Long tangled blond hair fell past her shoulder blades. She’d bend to search a low shelf then unfold, flipping that hair back, humming to herself as another book or a picture caught her fancy and she spent a few moments studying it. Completely unselfconscious, she didn’t seem to care if he watched her.

  Not that he was watching her.

  With a frown he dragged his attention back to his woefully sparse spreadsheet, labeling columns across the top.

  “Do you mind music while you work?” she said, picking out a CD from the vertical rack.

  “Go ahead.” He gritted his teeth and braced himself for whale songs or some such New Age thing.

  “I think you’ll like this. It’s Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.” She inserted the CD and a soft haunting voice began to sing in another language.

  Yep, just as he’d thought. Rafe tuned out and started tapping in numbers. The sooner he got through this, the sooner he could get down to the pier with his fishing rod.

  “Ooh, here’s a whole bunch,” she said, peering into a carved wooden box. She sauntered over to the table and plunked them in front of him. “Here you go.”

  Four of the six receipts were useless for tax purposes. He added the other two to his meager pile. “Fourteen down, God knows how many to go.”

  Lexie slid onto a chair and pulled her legs up beneath her. “So, Rafe, did you always want to be a tax agent when you grew up?”

  “Yes, accountancy fascinated me from an early age.”

  “Really?” Lexie asked, with a dubious frown.

  No. But he had a facility for numbers and after graduating from high school, accounting had seemed like the quickest ticket out of the small country town of Horsham where he’d grown up.

  Rafe shrugged. “It’s a living.”

  “It can’t be nice going to people’s houses and threatening them with the police if they don’t hand over their receipts.”

  Another twinge in his stomach. He clenched his teeth to control the wince. Nobody got it. Sure, it wasn’t the most thrilling job but it wasn’t fair that people saw him as the bad guy. “I’m here to help you. You’ve gotten yourself in trouble and I’m bailing you out. At taxpayers’ expense, I might add.”

  “So you think you’re doing a good thing?”

  “Yes, I do.” His fingers tapped the keys as he inputted her details at the top of the spreadsheet. “Where would we be without roads, hospitals, schools? I’m not the bad guy here.”

  She laughed incredulously. “You’re saying I am?”

  “You don’t take your responsibilities seriously. Absentmindedness is no excuse for failing to file a tax return.”

  “Humph.” She stood up in an indignant tinkling of bells, swished away a few paces then spun around, her skirt whirling. “You’re just like my family. That scatterbrained Lexie—she can’t handle her finances, she can’t take care of herself, much less a baby. Maybe I have different priorities. Maybe money and…and receipts…aren’t the most important things in life. Maybe people are.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. People who need hospitals and schools and roads.” His hands rested on the keyboard as he stared at her. “What baby?”

  “Pardon me?” Her skirts settled, her hands clutching the fabric. Color tinged her cheeks. “I didn’t say anything about a baby.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  RAFE STARED after her as she hurried from the room, wondering if he’d imagined her saying that about a baby. There was no evidence of an infant or a husband about the house, at least that he could see at a glance. She’d actually mentioned a friend’s toddler, not her own. Maybe she was pregnant and didn’t have a partner. Maybe she was worried about her future and wasn’t sure what to do.

  He shrugged and shook his head. Lexie’s baby—real, imagined or pending—was none of his business. Kids. He shuddered.

  He could hear her banging pots around in the kitchen and glanced at his watch. It was already past noon. The smell of food emanating from the kitchen was making his stomach rumble.

  Lexie returned, carrying a tray loaded with two white-and-blue Chinese soup bowls. Steam rose, spoons clinked gently. “My mother always says that a hungry man is a crabby man.”

  She set the soup in front of him. Two-minute noodles with a few slices of carrot floating on top. He glanced at her bowl and saw that she’d given him the larger portion. Either she was on a strict diet or she was hurting for money.

  “You didn’t have to feed me,” he said. “I planned to go into the village and find a deli for lunch.”

  “I was cooking anyway.” Picking up her spoon, she concentrated on scooping up the slippery noodles.

  This was awkward. Rafe didn’t usually dine with clients. That wasn’t the way for a tax auditor to “maintain an independent state of mind.” On the other hand, two-minute noodles weren’t exactly a sumptuous bribe that would turn his head.

  Lexie herself was a challenge, though. The sensuous way she moved, her blue cat’s eyes, the aura of sexuality that set his nerve endings tingling.…

  Aura? Had he actually thought that word?

  She must really be getting to him. It was ridiculous. She wasn’t even his age. He couldn’t tell exactly how old she was but she was definitely older.

  Picking up his bowl, he moved to the side of the table so he didn’t slop soup onto his computer and papers. Keeping his eyes down and not on the woman opposite, he tasted the bland, watery broth. “Mmm, good.”

  She combed her hands through her hair, pushing it back. Despite the paint stains, she wore a lot of rings. How did she keep them clean? “You should try meditating. It might help your ulcer.”

  “If I had an ulcer, acid-blocking medicine would help it more than New Age rubbish.”

  “How do you know unless you try it?”

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  A tiny smile curled her lips as she bent her head to her bowl. Rafe watched her full pink lips purse and her cheeks hollow as she sucked in the long noodles. He hadn’t tried meditating, of course, but he hated it when people made assumptions about him.

  He wasn’t some weedy dweeb with ink-stained fingers bent over a ledger. In his heart he was a sea-faring man, hunting schools of plump red snapper. Snapper would have been nice right now.

  Setting to with his spoon, he emptied the meager contents of his bowl. Then he pushed it away. “I’d better get on with your taxes.”

  “Finished already? You’re like my father and brother. They inhale food.” She reached for his bowl. “Do you want more? I could open another packet.”

  “No, thanks.” He patted his belly. “I couldn’t eat another thing. Now, Lexie, I really need those envelopes.”

  She rose to gather the dishes. “I’ll go look in my studio. You have my permission to search the house for them. At this point, your guess is as good as mine.”

  Rafe glanced around at the cluttered room crammed with pottery, books, paintings, notepads, sketch pads, flowers—including fresh, dried and dead—and all the rest of the flotsam and jetsam. No doubt every room in her house was similarly jam-packed. The thought of plowing through it—and on a curdled stomach—made him wince.

  He had to get out of this job before it killed him.

  LEXIE PERCHED on a wooden stool and studied the portrait of Sienna from across the room. To hell with looking for the envelopes, she needed to get this painting finished.

  The canvas was large, six foot by four, and was executed in her signature style, so highly detailed it looked almost as real as a photograph but with a magical quality. Sienna was posed like Botticelli’s Venus, draped in royal-blue cloth to set off her Titian hair, which cascaded over her shoulders in abundant loose curls. Her clear grey-green eyes gazed out above a narrow nose very faintly dusted with freckles.

  Lexie was satisfied she’d gotten the face right, was pleased she’d captured an expression of alert curiosity. Every hair was p
ainted with attention to texture and color. Along with the creamy skin of Sienna’s shoulder and one exposed breast. Sienna looked…alive.

  Yet the painting didn’t feel complete. Something was missing, Lexie knew it instinctively. She just couldn’t put her finger on what. She’d done six versions and this was the best. If she started mucking about again she might ruin what she’d already done.

  She tried instead to concentrate on the theme. Sienna by the bay. The unseen half seashell. Borne on the waves. Born of the sea…

  It was no use. Lexie glanced toward the house, wondering what Rafe was up to. Should she have allowed him to look through her things? He was a stranger, after all. He might be going through her underwear. Wouldn’t that be… Exciting.

  Stop it. Why was she thinking like that? He was way too young for her, practically a boy in short pants. It must be because she was blocked. She always got antsy under pressure.

  Sliding off the stool, she walked over to the tall cupboards at the back of the studio. She flung them open, hoping the tax envelopes would jump out at her. Nothing but painting supplies. Crouching lower, she looked through brushes, turpentine, old palettes, sketchbooks, flattened and twisted tubes of used oil paints.

  From the doorway, Rafe cleared his throat. “Excuse me. I need to calculate the percentage of household expenses accounted for by your studio.”

  Lexie stood up, shutting the cupboard. Rafe had walked across the lawn in his socks and a tuft of grass had caught between his bare toe and the torn sock edge.

  “This space is roughly a quarter of the square footage of the house. I paint out here and do my framing,” she said, gesturing to the trestle table along the side wall piled with off cuts of mat board and empty frames. “But I also use the house to research things on the internet, read art books and magazines.”

  “Since those are all deductible I’ll adjust the percentage upward.” He moved into the studio, glancing at Sienna’s portrait. “Is this your Archibald Prize entry?”

  “It’s supposed to be. I can’t seem to finish it.”