Murder at the Kessler Bar Mitzvah
By Greer Sutton
Sweet
A hundred and sixty hangers go out in order, from the door end, and the card on the coat table tells you to take the next one. That is the whole system.
Brenda Crane runs the Grange hall in Renfrow, Oregon. Noah Kessler reads at the synagogue in Eugene in the morning; in the afternoon half of Renfrow and half of Portland come to the hall for beef and barley out of his grandmother's pot. A hundred and forty for lunch, a hundred and twenty-eight coats.
While the family's cars are still pulling in, a man nobody knows comes in out of the snow and hangs up his coat.
By the time the coats go back out he is dead in the coat room, with no wallet and no name, and each side of the family is certain he belonged to the other.
The state police take her own building away from her. The town settles on the woman seen arguing with him by the door, and when that comes to nothing it settles on a quieter woman who never talks about where she came from. Brenda asked the question that started that, and has to watch what a fair question costs.
What she has is a rail of numbered hangers, one sheet of paper in her own hand, and thirty years of being handed things with a story already attached and learning to read the thing first.
*Murder at the Kessler Bar Mitzvah* is book three of the Grange Hall Mysteries: an Oregon timber town, a hall that holds a family's day without making anything of it, a fair-play puzzle anyone can check, and a schnauzer who remains no help to anybody.
Each Grange Hall Mystery is a complete case and can be read on its own, in any order.
