Andy Grant had warned the writer that he would need to have his own snowmobile as well as the airboat. There weren’t many days in the winter months when boating conditions were unfavorable, except when the temperature climbed above freezing; then the snow sometimes stuck to the bottom of the hull, making it difficult for the airboat to slide across the snow-covered ice. That was when you had to have a snowmobile. But in early January, when Danny arrived at Charlotte’s island, there was usually open water in the main channel out of Pointe au Baril Station-and often floating slabs of ice in the choppy water in the Brignall Banks Narrows. Early January was when the Polar airboat was essential-and, only occasionally, in mid-March. (In some years, albeit rarely, the ice in the bay began to break up that early.)

The airboat could cruise over ice and snow and open water-even over floating chunks of broken ice-with ease. It could go 100 MPH, though Danny never drove it that fast; the airboat had an airplane engine and a single, rear-mounted propeller. It had a heated cabin, too, and you wore guards to protect your ears from the sound. The airboat had been the most expensive element of making Turner Island habitable for Danny during those ten weeks in the coldest part of the winter, but Andy Grant had shared the cost with the writer. Andy used it as a work boat, not only in December, when the ice began to form in the bay, but from the middle of March till whenever the ice was entirely gone-usually, by the end of April.

Danny liked to be gone from Georgian Bay before the start of mud season; the ice breaking up in the bay held no attraction for him. (There wasn’t much of a mud season in Georgian Bay -it was all rocks there. But for Daniel Baciagalupo, mud season was as much a state of mind as it was a recognizable season in northern New Eng land.)

Since Charlotte ’s family used the bedroom in the main cabin only sparingly, as a guest room, Danny kept some of his winter clothing in the closet year-round-just his boots, his warmest parka, his snow pants, and his ski hats. Naturally, Charlotte’s and her family’s summer paraphernalia was everywhere-with new photographs on the walls every winter-but Charlotte had left Danny’s writing shack as it was. She’d found a couple of pictures of Ketchum with the cook, and two or three of Joe, which she had hung in the shack-perhaps to make Danny feel welcome there, not that she hadn’t already done enough to make him feel warmly invited to use the place.

Charlotte ’s husband, the Frenchman, was evidently the cook in their family, because he left notes for Danny in the kitchen about any new equipment that was there. Danny left notes for the Frenchman, too, and they traded presents every year-gadgets for the kitchen and sundry cooking ware.

The more recently restored sleeping cabins-where Charlotte and her husband, and their children, slept every summer-were understood to be off-limits to Danny in the winter. The buildings remained locked; the electricity and propane had been turned off, and the plumbing drained. But, every winter, Danny would at least once peer in the windows-no curtains were necessary on a private family island in Shawanaga Bay. The writer merely wanted to see the new photographs on the walls, and to get a look at what new toys and books the kids might have; this wasn’t really an invasion of Charlotte ’s privacy, was it? And, if only from such a wintry and far-removed perspective, Charlotte ’s family looked like a happy one to Daniel Baciagalupo. The notes back and forth with the Frenchman had all but replaced Charlotte ’s now-infrequent phone calls from the West Coast, and Danny still stayed out of Toronto at that September time of the year, when he knew Charlotte and her director husband were in town for the film festival.

Ketchum had advised the writer to live in the country. To the veteran river driver, Danny hadn’t seemed like a city person.

Well, that the writer spent a mere ten weeks on Turner Island in Georgian Bay didn’t exactly constitute living in the country; though he traveled a lot nowadays, Danny lived in Toronto the rest of the year. Yet-at least from early January till the middle of March-that lonely island in Shawanaga Bay and the town of Pointe au Baril Station were extremely isolated. (As Ketchum used to say, “You notice the birch trees more when there’s snow.”) There were not more than two hundred people in Pointe au Baril in the winter.

Kennedy’s, which was good for groceries and home hardware, stayed open most of the week in the winter months. There was the Haven restaurant out on Route 69, where they served alcohol and had a pool table. The Haven had a fondness for Christmas wreaths, and they displayed an abundance of Santas-including a bass with a Santa Claus hat. While the most popular food with the snowmobilers were the chicken wings and the onion rings and the French fries, Danny stuck to the BLTs and the coleslaw-when he went there at all, which was rarely.

Larry’s Tavern was out on 69, too-Danny had stayed there with Ketchum on their deer-hunting trips in the Bayfield and Pointe au Baril area-though there was already a rumor that Larry’s would be sold to make room for the new highway. They were always widening 69, but for now the Shell station was still operating; supposedly, the Shell station was the only place in Pointe au Baril where you could buy porn magazines. (Not very good ones, if you could trust Ketchum’s evaluation.)

It could be forlorn at that time of year, and there wasn’t a lot to talk about, except for the repeated observation that the main channel didn’t freeze over for all but a week or two. And all winter long, both the gossip and the local news provided various gruesome details of the accidents out on 69; there were a lot of accidents on that highway. This winter, there’d already been a five-vehicle pileup at the intersection with Go Home Lake Road, or near Little Go Home Bay-Danny could never keep the two of them straight. (To those year-round residents who didn’t know he was a famous author, Daniel Baciagalupo was just another out-of-it American.)

Naturally, the liquor store-out on 69, across from the bait shop-was always busy, as was the Pointe au Baril nursing station, where an ambulance driver had recently stopped Danny, who was on his snowmobile, and told him about the snowmobiler who’d gone through the ice in Shawanaga Bay.

“Did he drown?” Danny asked the driver.

“Haven’t found him yet,” the ambulance driver replied.

Danny thought that maybe they wouldn’t find the snowmobiler until the ice broke up sometime in mid-April. According to this same ambulance driver at the nursing station, there’d also been “a doozy of a head-on” in Honey Harbour, and an alleged “first-rater of a rear-end job” in the vicinity of Port Severn. Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.

Those ten weeks that Danny lived in the environs of Pointe au Baril Station were a strong dose of rural life; maybe it wasn’t enough country living to have satisfied Ketchum, but it was enough for Danny. It counted as the writer’s requisite country living-whether Ketchum would have counted it or not.

IN THE AFTER-HOURS RESTAURANT, the eighth and final novel by “Danny Angel,” was published in 2002, seven years after Baby in the Road. What Danny had predicted to Ketchum was largely true-namely, his publishers complained that a book by an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo couldn’t possibly sell as many copies as a new novel by Danny Angel.

But Danny made his publishers understand that In the After-Hours Restaurant was absolutely the last book he would publish under the Angel name. And, in every interview, he repeatedly referred to himself as Daniel Baciagalupo; over and over again, he told the story of the circumstances that had forced the nom de plume upon him when he’d been a young and beginning writer. It had never been a secret that Danny Angel was a pen name, or that the writer’s real name was Daniel Baciagalupo-the secret had been why.