The burned notes are sopping now, falling in wet, stuck-together ash clumps off the edge of the overflowing grill. A few last sparks float in the air, winking out one by one.

That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.

You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

You stop investigating the S&SB. You stop investigating the lighthouse. You leave the notes that remain in your office, which you’re well aware are legion, many more than what you burned at home in your pointless effort at catharsis.

“Ever had anyone try to burn a house down?” you ask the Realtor later that night, ducking in for a quick drink, a couple of cocktails that’ll put you to sleep and then wake you up again, restless and turning endlessly in your bed in the middle of the night.

The lights are dim, the TV a silent glow, a distant hum, the stars in the ceiling glinting on and off from the roving flash of spotlights on the bowling lanes. Someone’s playing a dark country-western song on the jukebox, but it sounds distant, so far away: Something’s moving through my heart. Sometimes I just have to play the part.

“Oh, sure,” the Realtor says, “warming to her task” as the veteran, suddenly a wit, puts it. “The usual kind of thing, with arson for the insurance. Sometimes it’s an ex trying to burn down the wife’s house once her new boyfriend has moved in. But more times than you might think, you don’t find any reason for it at all. I had one guy who got the urge to start a fire one day, and he let it all go up in smoke, and just stood there watching. Afterward he was crying and wondering why he’d done it. He didn’t know. There must have been a reason why he did it, though, I’ve always thought. Something he couldn’t admit to himself, or something that he just didn’t know.”

Anger tries to thrash its way free of you, manifests as a suspicion you’ve had for a while.

“You’re not a Realtor,” you tell the woman. “You’re not really a Realtor at all.” She’s a touch on some notes, she’s a cell phone that won’t sit still.

You need some air, walk outside, stand there in the gravel parking lot, under the uncertain illumination of a cracked streetlamp. You can still hear the music blaring from inside. The streetlamp’s shining down on you and the solid bulk of the hippo on the edge of the miniature golf course, its enormous shape casting a wide, oblong shadow. The hippo’s eyes are blank glass, its gaping mouth a fathomless space you wouldn’t put your hand into for all the free games Chipper’s could give you.