We drive back across the rickety wooden bridge, the waves crashing against the pylons, sending salty spray up into the windows. The lighthouse looms in the rear-view mirror, closer than it appears, but looking so very far away already, a single, grey spire next to a small white house on a rocky island. Its single eye sweeps slow circles around its top. The sky behind it is purple; in front of us, the sun is setting. Trevor says nothing as he pulls the car out onto the seaside highway, heading back towards home. He’s said nothing since I emerged from the lighthouse, empty-handed and brokenhearted and told him to drive us home. Elias Kent doesn’t live here.

I pick up the book from my lap and tuck it into the passenger-side door pocket. Closing my eyes, I lean my head back against the headrest. I feel like I could sleep for a day, but I don’t really want to. I just want to hide. Trevor had said repeatedly that we would never find Kent, that authors like him didn’t want to be found, that’s why he was always so vague with his biographical details, but I thought I had it figured out. It made so much sense.

“You know, Eric,” Trevor says, flicking on the headlights as the sky grows another shade darker. He’s going to remind me that he told me we’d strike out, and I really don’t want to hear it right now. “He might have moved.”

I open my eyes, stare at the roof of the car. “He didn’t move,” I say, my voice flat. “He never lived there.” I turn my head to look at Trevor. He’s concentrating on the road. “You were right. Coming all the way out here was ridiculous.”

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging and looking out his window at the ocean. “It’s very pretty up here. And, it’s always nice to get away for a little vacation.”

I turn my head back towards the ceiling, closing my eyes again. Three days driving around Maine with him is not my idea of a vacation. Neither is a wild goose chase.

• • •

I first read Elias Kent when I was 13. My mother was working for the town’s public library. She brought home a new book she thought I might like, about a college kid in New England who finds a ceramic zebra behind a dumpster one day, and his attempts to track it back to its original creator that leads him up and down the east coast. The zebra shatters halfway through the story, and the kid abandons his quest in order to focus on his studies. An internship during the summer between his Junior and Senior years lands him in the employ of a company that produces ceramic animals. Including the zebra.