Free Holding Lies by John Larison Page B

know.”
    The girlfriend answered, a beanpole of a girl, black hair, lip ring, swollen eyes—probably a couple years younger than Annie though she looked ten years more haggard. She was wearing hardly anything, tiny shorts or a bikini bottom (was there a difference these days?) and a muslin-thin tank top. If interested, he could’ve learned much about the geography of her dark nipples, which were barely concealed by the fabric.
    â€œI’m stopping by to pay my respects,” Hank said. He caught himself pulling at his beard, and forced his hands deep into his pockets. “I want to help however I can. This must be, this is … well, I can’t imagine how hard.”
    She turned and walked inside, leaving the door ajar.
    He followed her in. “Shut this?”
    She didn’t answer, and he decided to leave it open, an escape route. She was drinking and offered him a glass. He accepted, and watched as her bony arm tipped the vodka bottle like it was tonic. He guessed she didn’t do much eating.
    â€œHis mom is coming out on Tuesday,” she said. “It will be hers to deal with then. I’m so done being the one. I didn’t sign up for this, you-know-what-I-mean? It’s not that I’m a bad person or anything, but it’s not like I was in this for the long haul. It isn’t fair to stick me with this. We weren’t tight like that, you-know-what-I-mean? I’m not a bad person.”
    â€œIt’s too much for anyone.” There was a Bob Marley poster on the wall, another for Pink Floyd, the one with the nude women sitting beside a pool, their backs painted with each of the album covers. Bottles of hard liquor lined the windowsill, some sporting half-burned candles, wax dripping like frozen tears down the glass. The place smelled of cat, of incense, of unsmoked weed.
    With a series of eye-watering gulps, she drank her beverage down far enough that she could add some ice cubes. “You’re one of his coworkers? ”
    Hank considered this. Supervisor was more like it. “Yep, exactly.”
    Down the hallway, through an open door, he saw a fly-tying vise, a stack of fly boxes.
    â€œDo you think he’s dead?” she asked, while crunching on a piece of ice.
    â€œOh. Um.” He reached for the wall behind him, to lean against it, but stumbled slightly into the open room. He could have sworn there was a wall there. “A lot of possibilities. A lot of room for hope still.”
    â€œI’m sure of it,” she said. “To be honest. I told myself if he wasn’t found by last night … This is just so crazy. It’s not fair. Like you said, it’s too much for one person.” She looked toward the window as if she were considering issues of great philosophical weight. “It’s too much for one person.”
    Hank pointed his beverage down the hallway. “Do mind if I have a look at his flies?”
    The room with the fly-tying bench also housed all his rods, which were leaning with no apparent order in one corner. There was a laptop on a second desk—likely the site where he’d written those articles. On the small bookshelf nearby rested a single row of books, mostly whereto-fish books. The other two rows were filled with sideways stacks of magazines. All the fly-fishing titles, plus some snowboarding glossies he’d never seen before.
    On one wall hung the famous Sage poster of the guy double-hauling across the tropical blue from the roof of that crashed plane. On another, two posters, one of a big British Columbia river on a snowy morning and the other Jeff Callahan’s renowned image of the Ipsyniho at dawn. Images so common as to hold little or no interest for Hank. However, immediately above the laptop hung a slab of corkboard. There Hank found maybe twenty-five photos tacked. He was expecting to see Morell in each of them, holding a big fish, gripping and grinning like some weekend joe. But to