Less than a dozen miles out in the lake which was uncommonly dulcet, housebroken, not altogether a suitable stage for his death dream, were the Manitou Islands; the sacred home for the great spirit, he had heard, but didn’t know the particulars. Even the local hippies scorned the poor indigenous Indians as being less interesting than those of the Rockies; but then the alternative life-style types in Leelanau County had pretty much traded in their turquoise jewelry in favor of the wood stove revolution. His only real connection with the American Indian was his secret name, given him thirty years ago as a cub scout when he was inducted into the sacred order of the Webelos. The scoutmaster, who was also the school bandleader, was a trifle fey and liked the idea of giving this morose youngster, the son of the local police chief, a name that would doom him to the far side of heaven. Warlock. From that day on in the privacy of his own thought he was Warlock. Not a year later the scoutmaster had been run out of town after having been discovered in the middle of a sodomic frenzy in a camp privy.

He realized that, in that he was facing west, there was no point waiting around for the sunrise. He tossed the big dog in the back of the Subaru, and drove eastward across the peninsula, squinting at the rising sun as he passed through the village of Lake Leelanau. His favorite local place, the grocery store, wouldn’t be open for another hour or so. He was breathing deeply now, far from his plum-faced death, and heading home—there was an off chance Diana might have time for an embrace or two. Then he noticed a new road with a sudden sense of shock. Impossible! In the year of temporary unemployment, he had covered every road on the official county map. Now they were springing a new one on him.

The road had been hidden by a triangle of trees, and what he had thought of as a double driveway. And the road had the courtesy to own a sign that read Dead End: no wonder he hadn’t bothered with it. He drove a few hundred yards, ending up in the yard of a deserted, vandalized farmhouse. He got out, allowing Hudley to run interference, in a thicket of green burdocks, noting that he could see right through the empty windows to the Manitou Islands out in Lake Michigan. Glorious. He walked around the house and framed the red sun in another empty window. Always the art critic, he ascribed a definite “interesting” to these ruins.

Back home he was disappointed to find Diana in a rush to get ready for work. He drank a glass of ice water as she stood in her undies by the coffee maker which they had brought, at his insistence, because of a Joe DiMaggio commercial.