Murder at the Renfrow Centennial

Nine hooks inside the safe, numbered in brass. Nine tags. And a book with five columns — name, key, out, in, initials — because in Brenda Crane's hall a returned key needs two hands on it.

Renfrow turns a hundred, and the only room big enough to hold a hundred years is the Grange hall the county keeps talking about selling. For a week Brenda's main room is a museum, and Keith Gulick works late among fourteen panels with key four in his pocket.

On Sunday morning the fundraising chair comes in early to set out the chairs, and does not get as far as the chairs.

By evening the town knows why: he had pulled the 1953 deed nobody has read in seventy years, and everybody knows the Renfrows gave this hall away with something attached.

When Brenda reads that deed herself, the thing attached is real, and it is harmless. It reserves the free use of the hall, in perpetuity, to the families of men who died in the company's employ. It reserves no ownership and stands in the way of nothing.

So Keith Gulick did not die for a hundred years of history. He died for one panel of it — and that panel still stands in her main room, under a typed caption with two ordinary numbers nobody has put side by side.

What Brenda has is five lines in a book she ruled herself, twenty years of two hands on every return, and an old schnauzer asleep on the word WELCOME.

Murder at the Renfrow Centennial is book four of the Grange Hall Mysteries: an Oregon timber town, a civic hall that keeps everything, and a fair-play solution anyone can check.

Each Grange Hall Mystery is a complete case and can be read on its own, in any order.