He called me sweetheart, chuckled, and turned his back to me, leaving me standing there while he took my court.
The paddle rack at the Southwood Rec Center is a simple, democratic system of fairness.
It’s a balanced ledger, a clean set of books—and this guy, Cal, had been cooking them for weeks.
His arrogance was the phantom asset, the off-the-books transaction he thought no one was smart enough to notice. He was wrong.
What this silver-haired king of the court didn’t understand is that my entire career is built on exposing cheats, and his public conviction was about to come from a meticulously documented case file, a poster-sized piece of evidence, and an accomplice he never saw coming.
The Phantom Shift: The Fourth Paddle Down
The squeak of court shoes is my evening mantra. It’s the sound that scrapes the day’s residue from my brain—the endless columns of numbers, the search for a single misplaced decimal that could unravel a company’s carefully constructed lies. As a forensic accountant, my job is to find order in chaos. On the pickleball court, my job is to create it, one satisfying thwack at a time.
The Southwood Rec Center is a cathedral of controlled noise, smelling of rubber, sweat, and the faint tang of chlorine from the adjacent pool. For me, at fifty, it’s a haven. My husband, Mark, calls it my obsession. My seventeen-year-old son, Noah, just calls it “that dorky tennis thing for old people.” I call it sanity.
The system is simple, a pillar of rec center democracy. A long wooden rack with twenty vertical slots hangs on the wall. You slide your paddle into the next open slot. When a court opens up, the next four paddles in the line go on. Simple. Fair. An elegant solution to a logistical problem, not unlike a balanced ledger.
Tonight, I slide my pink paddle—a gift from Mark that he thought was hilarious—into the fourth slot. Brenda, my partner, puts hers in the fifth. We’re next up after the game on Court 2 finishes. We do our warm-up stretches, the comfortable rhythm of two people who have played together for years. We talk about her daughter’s college applications and my firm’s latest case, a construction company owner who was funding a secret second family with embezzled drywall money.
The game on Court 2 ends. A lanky guy named Dave waves the four of us on. I walk to the rack. My pink paddle isn’t in the fourth slot. It’s in the sixth.
Brenda’s is in the seventh. I frown, pulling it out. “Did you move these?”
She shakes her head, already heading for the court gate. “No. Maybe we miscounted?”
I know we didn’t. I counted. I always count. But the next group is already grabbing their paddles, a boisterous foursome led by a man everyone calls Cal. He’s got the kind of silver-haired, polo-shirt confidence that comes from a lifetime of closed sales and favorable tee times. He claps the guy next to him on the back, his laugh booming across the gym. They take our court.
I stare at the rack, then at the court. A ledger doesn’t just unbalance itself. A paddle doesn’t just walk two slots down. I shake my head, telling myself Brenda is right. I’m tired. The drywall guy has my brain twisted. It’s a mistake. My mistake.
A Case of Deja Vu
Two nights later, it happens again. I am meticulous this time. I walk up to the rack, note the three paddles already in line, and slide mine deliberately into the fourth slot. Brenda slides hers into the fifth. We sit on the bench, watch the game, and wait. The same crew is on the court: Cal and his disciples, laughing and high-fiving with an obnoxious amount of force.
When their game ends, I watch the rack like a hawk. People mill around, grabbing water, chatting. There’s a moment of crowd-induced chaos, the normal shuffling between games. By the time the path is clear, our paddles have migrated. Mine is in slot six. Brenda’s is in seven. And Cal’s crew, who were just coming off the court and should be at the back of the line, are grabbing paddles from the front and heading right back on.
“Okay, no,” I say, the word sharp. “I know I put it in the fourth slot.”
Brenda glances over, a worried little crease forming between her eyebrows. “Rina, are you sure? There were a lot of people over there.” She hates conflict. Her entire life is a master class in de-escalation, which is why we make such a good team. She smooths over the rough edges while I focus on the geometry of the shot.
“I’m positive,” I say, my voice low. I feel a prickle of something ugly on my skin. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m looking at a falsified invoice, a subtle wrongness that screams at you if you’re willing to listen. I watch Cal take the court, his paddle a blur of blue and green. He serves, a powerful, clean ace. He doesn’t even look toward the waiting area. He doesn’t have to. He got what he wanted.
Brenda gently tugs my arm. “Come on, it’s just one more game to wait. It’s not a big deal.”
But it is. It feels like a very big deal. It’s a closed loop, a system with a ghost in the machine. And I’m starting to think that ghost is wearing a sweat-wicking polo shirt.
About the Author
