A Rule Against Murder

PROLOGUE



More than a century ago the Robber Barons discovered Lac Massawippi. They came with purpose from Montreal, Boston, New York, and burrowing deep into the Canadian wilderness they built the great lodge. Though, of course, they didn’t actually dirty their own hands. What clung to them was something else entirely. No, these men hired men with names like Zoétique, Télesphore and Honoré to hack down the massive and ancient forests. At first the Québécois were resistant, having lived in the forest all their lives. They balked at destroying a thing of such beauty and a few of the more intuitive recognized the end when they saw it. But money took care of that and slowly the forest receded and the magnificent Manoir Bellechasse rose. After months of cutting and stripping and turning and drying the huge logs were finally stacked one on top of the other. It was an art, this building of log homes. But what guided the keen eyes and rough hands of these men wasn’t aesthetics but the certainty that winter’s bite would kill whoever was inside if they didn’t choose the logs wisely. A coureur de bois could contemplate the stripped trunk of a massive tree for hours, as though deciphering it. Walking round and round, sitting on a stump, filling his pipe and staring until finally this coureur de bois, this man of the woods, knew exactly where that tree would sit for the rest of its life.



It took years, but finally the great lodge was completed. The last man stood on the magnificent copper roof like a lightning rod and surveyed the forests and the lonely, haunting lake from a height he’d never achieve again. And if that man’s eyes could see far enough he’d make out something horrible approaching, like the veins of summer lightning. Marching toward not merely the lodge, but the exact place he stood, on the gleaming metal roof. Something dreadful was going to happen on that very spot.



He’d laid copper roofs before, always with the same design. But this time, when everyone else had thought it was finished, he’d climbed back up and added a ridge, a cap along the peak of the roof. He had no idea why, except that it looked good and felt right. And he’d had the copper left over. He’d use the same design again and again, in great buildings across the burgeoning territory. But this was the first.



Having hammered the final nail he slowly, carefully, deliberately descended.



Paid off, the men paddled away, their hearts as heavy as their pockets. And looking back the more intuitive among them noticed that what they’d created looked a little like a forest itself, but one turned unnaturally on its side.



For there was something unnatural about the Manoir Bellechasse from the very beginning. It was staggeringly beautiful, the stripped logs golden and glowing. It was made of wood and wattle and sat right at the water’s edge. It commanded Lac Massawippi, as the Robber Barons commanded everything. These captains of industry couldn’t seem to help it.



And once a year men with names like Andrew and Douglas and Charles would leave their rail and whiskey empires, trade their spats for chewed leather moccasins and trek by canoe to the lodge on the shore of the isolated lake. They’d grown weary of robbery and needed another distraction.



The Manoir Bellechasse was created and conceived to allow these men to do one thing. Kill.



It made a nice change.



Over the years the wilderness receded. The foxes and deer, the moose and bears, all the wild creatures hunted by the Robber Barons, crept away. The Abinaki, who often paddled the wealthy industrialists to the great lodge, had retired, repulsed. Towns and villages sprang up. Cottagers, weekenders, discovered the nearby lakes.



But the Bellechasse remained. It changed hands over the generations and slowly the stunned and stuffed heads of long dead deer and moose and even a rare cougar disappeared from the log walls and were tossed into the attic.



As the fortunes of its creators waned, so went the lodge. It sat abandoned for many years, far too big for a single family and too remote for a hotel. Just as the forest was emboldened enough to reclaim its own, someone bought the place. A road was built, curtains were hung, spiders and beetles and owls were chased from the Bellechasse and paying guests invited in. The Manoir Bellechasse became one of the finest auberges in Quebec.



But while in over a century Lac Massawippi had changed, Quebec had changed, Canada had changed, almost everything had changed, one thing hadn’t.



The Robber Barons were back. They’d come to the Manoir Bellechasse once again, to kill.



ONE



In the height of summer the guests descended on the isolated lodge by the lake, summoned to the Manoir Bellechasse by identical vellum invitations, addressed in the familiar spider scrawl as though written in cobwebs. Thrust through mail slots, the heavy paper had thudded to the floor of impressive homes in Vancouver and Toronto, and a small brick cottage in Three Pines.