The Lantern Festival Case

A-ma's shop was the brightest place on the whole lane.

It sat in an old red-brick shophouse just off Dihua Street, in the oldest part of Taipei, a neighbourhood called Dadaocheng. The building was more than a hundred years old. It had tall wooden doors, a long narrow room that went back and back, and a little courtyard at the very end where A-ma's orange cat, Mochi, slept in a patch of sun.

And it was full of lanterns.

Red lanterns, round as moons. Gold lanterns shaped like fish. Pink lanterns shaped like lotus flowers. Tiny lanterns no bigger than an orange, and huge lanterns you could have climbed inside. They hung from every beam on red strings, so many that when you walked in, you had to duck. A painted sign over the door said CHIU LANTERN SHOP in English and Chinese. A-ma had painted it herself, fifty years ago, when she was young and the shop was new.

Mara loved it more than anywhere in the world. Even more than the beach. Even more than the big bookshop in Xinyi with the reading stairs. When the lanterns swayed in a breeze from the door, the whole shop seemed to breathe.

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the lunar new year. Tomorrow was the fifteenth: the Lantern Festival. All over Taipei, people would light lanterns and eat sweet tangyuan and solve riddles written on paper slips. And here in Dadaocheng, the temple lane would hold its own lantern contest, the way it had every year since before A-ma was born.

Mara and Kai were staying with A-ma for the whole holiday. They were twins, eleven years old, and they did not look much alike. Kai was taller by a thumb. He was loud. He was always hungry. And he had the sharpest ears and the best nose of anyone Mara knew. He could smell oyster omelette from two streets away.

Mara was the one who noticed things. A crooked picture. A shoelace untied. A word spelled wrong on a menu.

"You two," A-ma liked to say, "are one good detective cut in half."