Chapter Twenty-Three
“Treasure,” Cam had said.
“Treasure,” I’d echoed dreamily.
“Buried treasure.”
“Right.” I laughed. “Buried treasure. Which is somehow different, because…”
“It’s not different, exactly,” Cam said. He shifted in the grass and turned over to look at me, cheek resting on his arm like a pillow. Cam had a way of making even the largest open meadow feel like a tiny rectangle around only the two of us. “But being buried is important.”
“What do you mean?”
He shifted closer.
“I mean that we could be over it right now. We’re not just going out and looking for treasure, V. Looking’s not enough. We have to dig for it. We have to figure out exactly where BGR put it, and then the real work comes.”
I squinted at him. “You’re only saying that because I’m in charge of research and you’re in charge of digging. I have the real job. You’re just muscle.”
Cam smiled and flexed the arm under his cheek. My stomach did a small, strange flip.
“Okay,” he said gently.
I had to tilt my head in to hear. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, we’ll see,” Cam said, still smiling. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine. And then we’ll figure out which one was more work.”
I felt his breath, even and light, on my cheek. We weren’t touching, but the grass was warmer next to him, like he was this tiny slice of the sun, and the rest of the meadow knew it.
Our eyes met, and I felt something in me catch.
Buried treasure, I thought.
I wondered how it would feel, once I had this thing solved and the two of us were staring at a plot in the ground.
It could be the very plot underneath us.
And then it would be Cam’s turn to take over.
But how far down would it be buried? How hard would it be to find the actual treasure in the ground?
“Fine,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”
“Treasure!” Gabriel gasps.
I pull a long golden chain out from the box.
An oval pendant and old-fashioned key, both in gold, hang from the chain.
I recognize the key as a skeleton key, with its longer, smooth shank and a single tooth at the end.
Mom brings home skeleton keys a lot when she takes on a new building renovation project.
They’re called skeletons because of how they’re made.
The middle teeth along the key are all shaved down, leaving only the “bone” behind.
The last tooth at the end turns it into a master key, able to open a series of doors rather than just one.
The key in front of me now is a lot smaller than a real skeleton key, though. It looks more like the key to a diary than to a real door.
The pendant next to it is only slightly larger. There are no stones embedded in it or colors painted over the top—just a crude engraving of a stick figure posing with one arm on its hip and the other pointing out to the side.
I pass the necklace over to Julia and Sunny, who stare at it appraisingly, each in turn.
Sunny blinks. “You think…you think that’s really it?” she asks me finally.
“What’s really it?” I ask.
“That this is the treasure,” Sunny says. I detect a trace of disappointment in her voice.
She holds up the necklace so the pendant and key dangle in front of me.
No rainbow-colored diamonds. No elaborate portrait of Harvey Milk.
The edges of the pendant are already fading into a pale green patina.
I sigh as I think of the Marsha P. Johnson vase and the Judy Garland bracelet.
If this really is our treasure, it looks a lot more… well, boring, than I hoped it would.
“I’m not sure,” I answer.
Cam points at the box. “There’s more in there,” he says, and I can tell he’s restraining himself from leaping up and picking through the contents himself.
I reach back into the box and pull out a scroll tied with a small piece of twine. Carefully, I slip the twine off. The brittle paper bends and crackles as I unroll it.
“Ooh,” Gabriel says, leaning over. “What’s that?”
Cam has silently made his way across the circle, where he now presses against my arm to see the page in front of us.
I’m holding the top and bottom taut, like I’m about to read out the names of everyone invited to Prince Charming’s royal ball. But there are no names in front of me. There are no words at all.
Instead, it’s absolutely crowded over with various pictures. They’re all drawn in ballpoint pen and convey the same feeling as the illustrations in the Gay Treasures book. Every line seems eager to pull together an image as fast as possible.
It would be easy to write off the picture as a collection of doodles on a page.
A clock here. A woman there. An octopus in one corner.
It’s the same trick as with the book, I realize—it looks unimportant if you’re not looking closely.
But the pictures are so specifically layered, each piece fitting so cohesively together, that right away I know the image has been planned out.
I can feel Cam’s breath on my skin. He points to one side of the page, at a drawing of two boys wearing triangular hats. The hats look stiff and strange, like a paper sailboat perched on each one’s head.
“Golden Gate Bridge,” Cam murmurs. He slopes his finger without touching the paper, tracing the outline of the overlapping hats.
As soon as he points out the shape, it becomes obvious. The paper hats form the exact shape, the exact curves, of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I turn to Cam, and his face is still so close to mine that our noses brush as he looks back at me. For some reason, the touch isn’t enough to push us away. We lock in on each other.
“It’s a map,” Cam says.
I don’t know if he whispers it, or mouths it, or even sends the words over to me through telepathy, but I hear them. I hear them because they’re the same words in my head.
We’re looking at a map of San Francisco.
This doesn’t make any sense, though. We’re supposed to be at the end of BGR’s hunt. I remember reading all about the treasure found in New York. According to the articles online, the person who found the New York treasure went through four main steps:
They figured out that the first clue in the New York chapter in Gay Treasures—“the minded middle of Stonewall”—referred to the middle name of Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most crucial figures in the Stonewall riots.
Marsha’s middle initial, P, famously stands for the phrase “Pay it no mind.” This phrase ended up being the key for a Playfair cipher in the chapter.
The decoded message to the Playfair cipher read:
NO FISH. NO PLAY. ONLY FOUND FAMIL-A.
The finder ended up digging in front of the first A at the Hamilton Fish Play Center sign in Manhattan, where Marsha P. Johnson founded and ran STAR House, a home for displaced young queer people. That’s where they dug up the vase with Marsha’s portrait.
I’m running through the steps of our own hunt in my head:
Figure out the gay icon—the giant between streets, Harvey Milk.
Locate the key to a cipher—Harvey’s “btwn streets” birthday party flyer.
Solve the decoded message—
“TREASURE ISLAND BUILDER READS ARCHITECTURE 723.”
Find the treasure.
So what the heck are we now doing with a random necklace and a treasure map?
“There’s something else in the box,” Gabriel says. “I think it’s a clue.”
“Another clue?” Sunny groans. “I don’t even care if I sound like Patrick Gates anymore. This is ridiculous.”
I let Cam hold on to the map as I pull out a final piece of paper, which isn’t rolled and tied neatly but folded into quarters and pressed into the bottom of the box.
The paper is just as brittle as the drawing. I pry it open and smooth it out as best I can into the center of our circle.
“Are you kidding me?” Sunny cries as she sees what’s on it.
The page is filled with random, nonsensical words. I study it a moment, then sit back on my haunches and turn to Cam. “What’s the key?”
He looks up from the map. “Huh?”
I gesture to the note. “It’s a substitution cipher, just like you said it would be. So, what’s the key?”
Cam bites one corner of his lower lip. I see him chewing over his next thought, trying to disguise his worry.
It’s like he’s in the tree behind Portals of the Past again, and I’m standing on the ground, staring up at him.
If he gives this away, we don’t need him anymore.
We can go back to racing him to the end. He could lose everything.
“You promised,” I remind him.
He blinks out of the trance and clears his throat.
“Harvey,” he says quietly. “ ‘Harvey’ is the key.”
Julia pulls out her notebook. “How do you do a substitution cipher?” she asks me.
“Here.”
I hold out my hand for the pen and turn to a fresh page in her notebook, then write out the alphabet over the top row. Underneath, I write the word “HARVEY,” followed by the rest of the alphabet—minus all the letters in the key word.
“Now you write the message again,” I tell Julia. “But you replace every A with an H, every B with an A, every C with an R…”
“I get it,” Julia says, pulling the notebook back. She flips back and forth between the pages, decoding the message letter by letter until we’re left with a poem:
Congratulations! You have found
The San Francisco Bonus Round
For of my treasures, far and wide
My home imbues the deepest pride
No added ciphers, codes to break
Ground yourself for what’s at stake
Read the map, find the point
Grab the shovel to anoint
If you seek the lock and key
You will have to dig down deep