Chapter Eighteen
“Okay,” Julia says as we goose-step over the shortest pile. “This is either an insanely elaborate game of Jenga or the most creative cityscape model I’ve ever seen.”
Sunny huffs as she pulls a book down from the top of the tallest stack, which currently ends at her waist. The books are sticking out in every direction, precariously holding together while they pull a slow-going Leaning Tower of Pisa. But the pile near Gabriel, I notice, is meticulously stacked.
Sunny and Gabriel are sorting the books.
“It might be a third option,” I offer.
Julia shakes her head. “Nope. No…only those two. Jenga or cityscape.”
“Oh! 1979,” Sunny reads from the inside jacket.
Gabriel holds out a hand. “Give it here.” He carries the book to his pile.
“You’re pulling all the titles that were published before Gay Treasures,” I say.
Sunny already has her nose in the next book. “Ding ding ding.”
“Dang.” Julia snaps her fingers. “Ivy wins.”
I walk over to the pile near Gabriel. “Anything interesting?”
“Sadly, no,” Gabriel says. He makes a frame with his thumbs and index fingers. “But I’m still waiting for a pattern to spring out at me.”
“And we’re not done,” Sunny calls. She nods at the rest of the books over her shoulder. Julia dutifully pulls the next book down and checks the copyright year.
I tilt my head sideways to look at the titles in Gabriel’s stack.
An unpleasant feeling is gnawing at my belly.
There’s an unspoken agreement here, I think.
If you’re playing a game, you assume the game is fair.
If you’re answering a riddle, that means the riddle must have a proper answer.
Doing a treasure hunt is like the extreme version of that.
It’s the ultimate trust fall. There has to be some kind of stability to the clues, because otherwise, the entire concept disintegrates in your hands.
“Let’s pause a second,” I say uneasily.
Sunny glares at me. “Says the person who literally got here one second ago.”
“Okay, fair! Yes, I just got here. But hear me out: I am seeing a pattern.”
Gabriel whips his head around. He looks again at his stack of books. “What’s the pattern?”
“The pattern is, books circulate between library branches,” I say. “And I’m pretty sure they always have, even in the 1980s. So it would be a terrible idea for Gilbert Baker to put a clue in a single book, even if it did manage to stay in circulation until now.”
“So, what?” Sunny says icily. “You’re saying this is all useless?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not saying that. Nothing you’re doing is useless. I was the one who walked away and made Julia go after me. And the whole time, both of you were working your asses off. No one has acted useless in this group except me.”
Sunny snorts. “Say it louder for the people in the back.”
“I’m useless!” I call out in the loudest stage whisper I can manage. I mean, we’re still in a library, after all.
“All right.” Sunny sets her book down. “So what do we do now?”
I look around at the shelves. “Julia, can you get your notebook out? I want to see the history center notes again.”
Julia hops over a stack of books to her backpack at the far end of the aisle. She pauses a moment, staring down into the open compartment.
“Did one of you open my backpack?” Julia asks.
Sunny and Gabriel shake their heads. The three of us zigzag around the maze of books and stand next to Julia. She carefully extracts her notebook, which now has some kind of laminated page peeking out over the top.
“I didn’t put this in here,” she says quietly.
I hold out my hands, and Julia passes the notebook over. I open it to the insert, which turns out to be three different brochures stacked on top of one another. But they’re not actually brochures. They’re more like…Oh no.
I take a sharp breath.
Gabriel reads the titles of each empty book jacket over my shoulder. “The Watergate Girl. The Truth About Watergate. Watergate: A New History. What’s all this? Is Watergate a clue or something?”
Julia’s eyes slide over to mine. There’s a small note on top of the book jackets. It’s the same note I left in Cam’s locker.
Watergate Internal Business
Except now there’s an additional line in Cam’s handwriting, just below mine.
Nice try!
“Damn it!” I say, slightly too loud for library-speaking levels. “Damn it,” I say again in a whisper.
This is bad. This is extremely bad. I think about the past week of watching Cam hide his books on Watergate and how smug I felt, knowing he was behind us. And now I know that the entire time I was feeling smug, he was feeling twice as smug!
I look up at Julia. “When did you put your backpack down?”
“Like five minutes ago! Right after you stomped off.” Julia swallows and checks over her shoulder.
“Someone please tell me what the hell is going on,” Sunny says.
I lean out from our aisle and peer down either direction before turning back to the group.
“Cam’s here. He’s here, and he knows I planted a fake clue in his locker, and wherever we’re supposed to be looking right now, like wherever the clue ‘architecture seven two three’ actually leads, he’s probably already there. ”
Sunny’s eyes widen. “Damn it!”
“Exactly!” I say. “So we’d better start thinking fast.”
I start pacing back and forth down the aisle.
“Treasure Island builder reads. Architecture seven two three. Builder. Architecture. George W. Kelham. The Naval Station Treasure Island. The main library. Builder. Builder.”
“Are you, like, a shitty AI program?” Gabriel asks. “Where we feed you a list of random words and you spit out an awful slam poem?”
My head snaps up. “Wait a second. The clue isn’t leading us to one book! It’s to a whole section!”
“You already said that,” Julia murmurs, clearly a little embarrassed for me.
“Yes,” I say, “but now I might actually have an idea of what’s going on.”
I look down at the gleaming ivory tile, then up at the glazed porcelain wall.
The outer rim of the wall curves slightly as it twists toward the central circle in the main foyer.
Overhead, the windows mimic a golden spiral.
The lines are all clean and modern. This isn’t Art Deco architecture.
It’s not Moderne style. It’s not even brutalist.
“What year did the library first open?” I ask Gabriel.
He turns on the yearbook camera and looks down at the most recent photo. “The archival note said…1917.”
He zooms in on the image so I can see what he’s reading. It’s the handwritten caption on the original photo we found in the history center.
“Can you zoom back out?” I ask. I stare at the front facade of the building. “I don’t remember columns above the front doors.”
Gabriel squints. “It’s the same building, Ivy. Maybe they just took the columns off sometime after it opened.”
“Yeah, maybe.” But suddenly I have to go look again. Right now. I dip into the next aisle and pull an empty return cart over, then grab an armload of books off the floor. “Come on. Let’s put these away and go outside and look.”
“Are you serious?” Sunny asks. “We’re just going to walk away from all this work? With Cam lurking around somewhere?”
“I just want to look!” I hiss.
After a few minutes, we’ve loaded the cart and walked back through the front doors.
I signal everyone across the street over to Civic Center Plaza so we can see the building properly.
The three front doors of the main library match up with Gabriel’s photo.
So do the five overhead windows and the wings on either side.
Gabriel is right—this does look like the same building.
But something feels wrong. Why would they take the front columns away?
And why is the shape of the windows suddenly different?
Sunny leans against my arm as she looks at the photo. I feel her head tip up and down as she goes through the same checklist.
“So your theory,” she says slowly, “is that we’re in the wrong library?”
“Maybe. I didn’t say that exactly,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Julia comes to my other side and looks at the photo.
I half expect to see her chin bob up and down like Sunny’s did.
But instead of looking up at the library and back down, Julia cocks her head to the left, then back at the photo.
Left, and photo. I follow her gaze to another large concrete building farther down the block.
“What is it?” I ask her.
Julia points. “I came that way this morning,” she says. “I got lost looking for the coffee place. I sort of think…the building in the photo might be…”
She trails off and starts walking down the sidewalk. Sunny, Gabriel, and I all glance at each other. We turn and head after her. The three of us have barely crossed to the other side of Civic Center Plaza when Julia suddenly whoops triumphantly a few yards ahead.
“This is it!” she shouts.
She waves us over until we’re standing directly across from the building literally next door to the place we just were.
Gabriel opens the camera again, but we don’t even need to see the old photo side by side to know, immediately, that Julia is right.
This is the library from the photo—the one that George W.
Kelham designed and built in 1917. But it’s not the main library anymore. Now it’s—
“The Asian Art Museum,” Julia reads off the building’s stone inscription.
Asian Art Museum
Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture
“Wow.” Sunny looks impressed. “My people! This is, like…the coolest form of gentrification.”
I look over at her. “I think, technically, gentrification is when wealthy people take advantage of cheap property in poorer areas. So I don’t know if a library turning into an art museum counts as gentrification.”
Sunny nods. “Okay, Asianification, then.”
“But that’s not really a thing—”
Gabriel stops me. “Shhhh. Let her have this,” he says.
We stare at the building.
“So, what do we do now?” Julia asks.
I take a deep breath and close my eyes to think. I’ve been in this situation before—watched buildings’ signs change, seen their insides gutted, seen new personalities take over old bodies like it was no big deal. Nothing in San Francisco ever stays the same.
Nothing ever stays the same.
My arms feel uncomfortably warm. I open my eyes. “I guess…we go inside anyway,” I say finally. “And see how much things have changed. Who knows, maybe Gilbert Baker’s clue is still in there.”
Julia links arms with me. “Let’s go, then, Dorothy.”
“Hell no,” Sunny says. “I’m the Dorothy in this scenario.”
I shrug. “That’s fine. You can be Dorothy.” I’m trying hard not to sound as completely defeated as I feel.
“Lion!” Julia calls, raising her hand.
Gabriel throws back his shoulders and links his arm with my free one. “As long as it’s agreed that the Scarecrow was actually smart the whole time—because he was—I’ll be the Scarecrow.”
“You can be the Tin Man,” Sunny tells me. “Come on, everyone. For a home!” she says, marching us ahead.
“For bravery!” Julia shouts.
“For a diploma!” Gabriel adds.
I turn over my shoulder and spare one last glance at the new library. I think about Cam inside, stalking up and down the gleaming aisles, searching for the next clue. Something aches deep in my chest.
“For a heart,” I say softly.