The Drowned Lantern: A Gripping Historical Novel of a Flooded Village, a Falsified Date, and the Woman the Water Was Meant to Take (The Inheritance of Silence Book 6)

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The Drowned LanternStill water is the most honest mirror and the deepest liar.Every August the valley comes down to the reservoir and sets two hundred paper lanterns on the flattest water of the year, each one carrying a family's name toward the dam wall a kilometre downstream. Every August, somewhere in the first hundred metres, one of them tips and fills and goes under while the rest sail on — the same lantern, in the same stretch of water, every single year for longer than anyone now living can explain.Then an old man collapses in the inn his father built, surfaces once in a hospital bed, says a name and the word debt, and goes back under before anyone can ask him which he meant.Because sixty-two years ago this valley was informed that it was going to become a reservoir — and the man holding the relocation paperwork for every household in it was sitting at this family's desk.Kamiyanagi went under in stages: surveys first, then a date, then the settlements, calculated house by house by a man everyone trusted because he had never in his life given them a reason not to. One woman checked her figures against her neighbours' and began drafting a letter. She never sent it. The evacuation date moved for exactly one house that summer, and the water came up on schedule, and the valley agreed without ever discussing it that the matter was closed.Behind the plaster of the spring-house wall, where a renovation nobody approved was quietly halted in 1963, there is a box of figures in two hands — the ones that were filed, and the ones that were true.Now the wall is open, three women are reading their own grandfather's arithmetic, and the only person left who was there has been keeping a promise for sixty-one years that he was never given a reason for.Two hundred lanterns will go onto the water again this August. For the first time in sixty-two years somebody in that valley knows why one of them never crosses — and what it would take to let it. Read more