RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.