Holding Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes. Keeping the fly broadside would, and did, make the difference. He’d asked Walter that night and discovered the mystery girl’s name. “Ah, Carrie? She caught her first fish when you were still shitting in your drawers.”
    Then one June, the same year Annie was born, Caroline didn’t return to the Ipsyniho. He heard through the grapevine that she’d married some rich guy and gotten pregnant. For once, the rumors were true.
    â€œWhen men go looking for a wife,” she had quipped once about that marriage, “they’re really looking for real estate.”
    They passed along the fence with a No Trespassing sign nailed to every fifth post, then turned into her driveway. She held open the gate for him, and as he pulled through, her two Rottweilers leapt at the open window, roaring and biting. He blew each a kiss and pulled around the back of the house, where Caroline liked him to park. By the time the dogs came racing around the corner, he was on one knee, a hug for each of them. They licked his eyes and mouth and beard savagely.
    This property had been Caroline’s grandparents’. They’d bought it after the First World War when western property values, like so much, plummeted. Now, she had two thousand acres all to herself. The house sat a hundred feet or so above Sunshine Creek, its patter the familiar sound track of her deck. To some—to most, maybe Hank included— living here as Caroline did would have been a desolate prospect. An entire valley with no one else in it. But Caroline wasn’t made lonely by being alone.
    From the outside, the house looked weathered and a generation past its prime. A look, Hank figured, she had cultivated. On the inside,she had opened the ceiling, constructed a loft (which was where they cuddled and watched movies on rainy nights), wired track lighting and surround speakers, revamped the kitchen, added a bathroom. Hank’s favorite addition was in the corner, a two-hundred-gallon aquarium complete with a current, which the trout dodged with cobbles Caroline had hand plucked from the river. He stood before the aquarium now, and watched Charlie, a four-inch cutthroat, rise and take something on the surface.
    For years Caroline’s free hours had been devoted to improving this house, but for the past weeks she had been devoting those hours to Hank’s place, helping him ready it for Annie’s arrival. “Can’t have your daughter staying in squalor.”
    â€œIt’s going to be a hot morning,” Caroline said now. “I might take a look at the creek.”
    They descended the trail, leapt the two logs that had fallen last winter, and emerged in the morning sun along the clear steam. A moss-drenched cliff towered against the far bank, while just downstream the land fell away at the edge of a waterfall. If they walked over and looked down, they’d see the blue hole twenty feet below, and maybe an otter lounging along the edge. Upstream, the water descended the serpentine vertebrae of the valley, polished boulders gleaming in the early sun. Hank knew of few places on this earth that felt more removed than this one.
    And yet, he’d brought them with him. “Do you think Morell lost the boat in Whitehorse?”
    She took off her sunglasses and tossed them into the shade. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
    â€œBut what do you think happened?”
    She pinched him. “I dreamt about you last night.”
    â€œDreamt?” He’d forgotten that she’d come home and slept. “What did you dream?”
    She unzipped his pants. “This.”
    They ravaged each other there on the sunbathed beach with the wet passion of young idealists, or the newly grieved.
    Afterward, she tiptoed naked onto the top edge of the waterfall, peered over quickly, and turned to face him. She was backlit, and her body seemed to be steaming there, a creekside apparition. It was a mossy