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."

Kai was in the workroom at the back, by the courtyard, where A-ma made the lanterns.

It smelled of glue and bamboo and paint. Thin strips of bamboo lay in bundles on the long table. There were pots of paste, rolls of silk, and sheets of shining gold paper. Kai had paste on his nose and was trying very hard to build a small fish lantern. It looked more like a potato.

"It's a fish," said Kai, before Mara could speak.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to." He held it up. "A-ma says my fish is full of spirit."

"That means it's a potato," said Mara, and Kai threw a ball of paper.

At closing time, A-ma took them both to the middle of the shop and switched off the big lights.

"Look up," she said.

They looked up.

There, hanging from the strongest hook on the strongest beam, was the dragon.

It was longer than a bicycle. Its body was made of bamboo ribs covered in red silk, and every scale was a tiny square of gold paper, glued on by hand. Its eyes were round and kind. Its whiskers were long gold ribbons. When A-ma clicked on the little light inside it, the whole dragon glowed, warm and golden, and the scales shone like coins, and its shadow swam across the ceiling.

Mara forgot to breathe.

"My last big lantern," said A-ma softly. "Fifty years of lanterns, and this is the last big one. My hands are getting old." She held up her fingers, which were knobbly now and shook a little. "I am not entering the contest this year. I just wanted to make one more dragon. For you two."

"For us?" said Kai.

A-ma nodded. "Look inside the tail, when it's lit. Very small. I always hide something."

Mara stood on tiptoe and peered into the glowing tail. And there, painted in tiny black brush strokes on the inside of the silk, so small you could only see them with the light behind, were two names. Mara's name. And Kai's.

Nobody said anything for a while. Mochi the cat wound round their ankles.

Before bed, A-ma showed them one more thing. On a high shelf in the workroom stood an old biscuit tin, red and gold, with a picture of a crane on the lid. She lifted the lid. Inside, on a bed of string ends and buttons, lay a single brass key.

"The spare key to the back door," she said. "In case I lose mine. Only family knows it's here." She paused, and smiled a little. "Family, and my old apprentices. Long ago, they used it every morning to open up before I came down."

"How many apprentices did you have?" asked Mara.

"Three," said A-ma. "Two moved away. One still lives in Taipei." She put the lid back on. "Bed."

That night A-ma locked the big wooden front doors, and the little back door to the courtyard, and hung the shop bell back on its hook so it would ring if anyone came in. Then they all went upstairs to bed.

In the morning, the dragon was gone.