Murder at the Smith Wedding
By Greer Sutton
Sweet
Four long cloths went out for the Smith wedding. Three came back.
Brenda Crane spent thirty years telling museums and auction houses what a piece of cloth actually was. Now she runs the Grange hall in Renfrow, Oregon — a 1911 timber-frame building the county owns, has stopped repairing, and would very much like to sell. She takes the bookings, she counts the linen, and she irons eleven feet of damask at eleven at night because nobody else is going to.
The Saturday reception ends with a man dead in the gap between the prep counter and the wall, and his jacket folded over the back of a chair — which is the one thing about it that stops Brenda where she stands, because Ray Nissen never folded anything in his life.
By Monday the county has taped off her kitchen and settled on Dale Hakala. The caretaker has kept that boiler alive since before most of Renfrow was born, and he will not account for ninety minutes of Saturday evening. He will not say where he was. He will not say why.
Brenda cannot prove Dale did not do it. What she has is a count that came out wrong twice, and a scorch across the weave of a tablecloth that nobody else in town would look at twice.
Nobody asked her to look. Nobody ever does.
Murder at the Smith Wedding is book one of the Grange Hall Mysteries: a small Oregon town in a timber county with the mill long closed, a building worth saving, a fifty-five-year-old amateur investigator who knows exactly one thing extremely well, a wrongly accused friend, a fair-play puzzle laid out in full before the answer, and a schnauzer who is no help at all.
Each Grange Hall Mystery is a complete case and can be read on its own, in any order.
