The Mystery of the Broken Wooden Boat

As my father lay dying, he gripped my hand and said just one thing: "Don't lose the boat."

He didn't say why.

It wasn't until I found the oilcloth bundle beneath the boat that I understood. Inside was half of a faded old photograph. The woman in it wore a blue cotton shirt washed nearly white, her eyes staring straight ahead as if fixed on something deadly.

From that day on, strange things began to haunt me.

The boat rocked by itself in the middle of the night. The unfamiliar scent of osmanthus drifted in through the window. A woman's embroidered shoe appeared by my pillow, though it wasn't mine.

That's when I learned that the battered wooden boat my father had guarded all his life concealed a decades-old unsolved case.

And the woman in the blue cotton shirt hadn't jumped into the river and died.

She had been pushed.

The people in the river wanted the truth to rot beneath the boat.

But I was determined to pry open the boat's mouth and make it tell its long-buried secrets, one word at a time.