If life drives you into a corner, make colorful paper lanterns, decorate that corner with them—and live happily. Yevlampiya Romanova isn’t afraid of problems, but sometimes there are so many of them that even Lampa gets lost. Irina Golikina came to Max Wolf’s office and announced that her daughter had gone missing. The client called the girl Alice—baby, little one, child. But it turned out that “the baby” is… twenty-four years old, and she works as a teacher in a college. The mother literally led her daughter by the hand everywhere. So maybe Alice ran away from her annoying mother’s supervision? The detectives took up the search and found out that on the eve of her disappearance, the girl was seen with a student from their college, Nikita Rakitin: the young people went down into the basement of the academic building. Nikita is an artist, known in England as an illustrator of children’s books, who recently returned to Russia. But his father is serving time in a prison camp for murder. Wolf’s team began studying the past of the elder Rakitin—and then skeletons started tumbling out of every closet…