Chapter Twenty-Five
I creep onto the Judah line the next morning like a cartoon detective, back pressed to the brick town house on the corner. I can’t imagine why any of the other yearbook crew members would be here on a Sunday morning, but still…just the thought of being seen alone with Cam makes me nervous.
Once I’m safely on the train, I look around, expecting to see him in one of the seats.
But the entire section is empty save for an older woman surrounded by three crates of recycled plastic bottles.
I glance at my phone and sigh. The next train doesn’t come for another fifteen minutes.
I’ll have to wait around Union Square for him.
Except, as the train pulls to the stop at Union, I see that Cam is already waiting for me.
“Good morning,” Cam says cheerily.
“You’re too early.”
“Wowza. Didn’t realize that was a crime.”
I squint at him. “How long have you been here?”
Cam hitches his thumb over his shoulder. “Not long. I just did a little exploring around the neighborhood.”
My eyes widen. “Excuse me—‘a little exploring’? Why not explore the entire city without me? What the heck am I doing here, Cam?”
“Relax, Goldilocks,” he says, even though he’s the one with springy blond hair and I probably look like Wednesday Addams in comparison. “I’m not too early. You’re not late. Everything is just right. Now let’s go!”
I huff and sigh, then follow Cam up the next few blocks toward Chinatown.
We each reveal the book, flyer, and box in turn as we walk, but agree to keep them all sealed away in my backpack unless we find something really, really good.
In the meantime, we work off the photos Gabriel sent us digitally.
Cam zooms in on the bottom left section of the scroll.
“Look at her,” he says, pointing at the drawing of a woman in a long, boxy floral dress with her arms outstretched. “I saw a statue up here that reminds me of her.”
He leads us into St. Mary’s Square. We walk through basketball courts and past rows of flagpoles until we’re standing right across from a tall metal sculpture.
“Dr. Sun Yat-Sen,” I read from a plaque in front.
Cam and I take a long step back to study the sculpture next to the drawing.
“Well…” I say. “The robe is similar. Ish. But this is of a man, not a woman.”
“The point of the picture is to disguise the landmark, V. He can’t just draw the same statue exactly.”
“Right, but there has to be a clear connection somewhere,” I argue. “The robe isn’t as boxy as the dress. The hands in this sculpture are folded rather than pointing. It’s just not the same.”
Cam looks back and forth between his screen and the figure of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen in front of us.
“It’s not the same,” he says finally. “Dang. I was sort of hoping we could solve this part and skip the rest.”
I look at him, surprised. “How could we have skipped the rest?”
He points at a small oval pendant hanging around the woman’s neck in the picture, with the tiniest charm key dangling next to it.
“It’s the necklace from the box,” Cam says.
I blink at the detail. He’s totally right—this is our necklace.
Gilbert Baker wouldn’t put it on this particular figure unless she was important to the ultimate solution.
Crucial, even. I stare at the woman, trying to see something in the pattern of her dress, which is crawling with flowers, vines, and random fruit buried in the center.
I look at the woman’s arms, at her face…
but there’s no recognition there. I haven’t seen a single statue around the city that looks like this.
We head up Kearny Street and stop for dumplings in the middle of Chinatown.
I’m always so fascinated by the combination of shops here—the mix of bakeries and restaurants that look like they could have been around forever, alongside strange, shiny art galleries with human-sized Transformers and giant knock-off balloon dog sculptures.
The new crowds in on the old, less a harmony of different stores mixing and more like a wrestling match of stores vying for the heart of the neighborhood.
One type speaks to the past, the other to a cold, garish future.
We finish the dumplings and toss the empty bag into a trash can outside of Portsmouth Square.
“Oh, here’s something,” Cam says, pulling his phone back out of his pocket.
He brings us over to a narrow boulder with a small three-dimensional house chiseled inside. We look over the inscription below the house.
“The first public school in America. That’s cool.” He begins searching around the drawing on his phone, scrolling and zooming into different parts.
“I don’t think it’s in here,” I say, looking at the image on my own phone screen.
Cam sighs. He checks over his shoulder, then does a double take. “Hey!”
He jogs across the square to another monument, this one a large, smooth rock like a tombstone. A brass ship sits on top of the stone, with gold lettering carved into the side. The first three words glint in the sunlight.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
“This is interesting,” Cam says, searching through the image on his phone again.
I pull up next to him. “I think that’s the problem,” I say. “Everything’s sort of interesting, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Cam asks. He motions to the top of the stone. “Robert Louis Stevenson! As in—”
“As in Treasure Island,” I say. “I know. But imagine how many Robert Louis Stevenson monuments there are. Imagine how many Harvey Milk monuments there are! There are too many possible connections out there. We can’t just turn everything into a clue.”
“Okay…” Cam tucks his phone back into his pocket and faces me, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “So what do you suggest we do?”
“I don’t know,” I say, stepping away from the stone. “Maybe we don’t try to force things so much. Just look around and see if anything sticks out.”
Cam gives me an almost imperceptible eye roll. “Fine.”
We agree to head up to Coit Tower to get a bird’s-eye look around the bay.
“Maybe we’ll match up the angle of the Golden Gate Bridge from there,” I say helpfully.
“Umph,” Cam grunts as we settle onto the bus at Kearny and Jackson.
I stare out the window for a while, watching the storefronts and buildings blur outside, wondering what they looked like fifty years ago, when Gilbert Baker was deciding where to hide his treasures.
“That necklace thing is so weird,” I say. “Good catch on seeing it in the picture.”
Cam shifts next to me. He rests his chin on his arm, so we’re both looking out the window.
“How is it weird?”
“Well, what’s the deal with the necklace, you know? Is it a clue, or is it part of the treasure?”
Cam shrugs. “Maybe it’s both. I’ll bet the necklace itself is pretty valuable.”
“Yeah, but it can’t be the actual treasure,” I argue.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s so…”
“What?” Cam asks. “Dull?”
I think back to when I first saw the necklace in the wooden box. How it looked like any necklace sitting in an antique store window. Just gold and nothing else.
“It’s too straight-coded,” I say, laughing a little.
Cam doesn’t laugh with me.
“How does a necklace read as straight to you?”
I can feel the budding anger in his tone. I swallow. “I more meant…it doesn’t have any rainbow stones, like the Judy Garland treasure did. Even the Marsha P. Johnson treasure was super colorful.”
“So you meant to say ‘colorful,’ then.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Cam looks at me pointedly. “Then just say ‘colorful,’ Ivy. You don’t have to code an object as gay or straight. Gay people all look different from one another. Some of us might be more colorful, and some of us are…I don’t know. We’re just trying to be ourselves, you know?”
I stare down at my lap and knit my fingers together. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Cam says. He sighs and stares out the window.
The bus stops. We get off near Coit Tower and begin strolling around the neighborhood. As we turn onto Sansome Street, Cam peers up ahead, using his palm as a visor.
“Hey. What’s that?”
He’s looking at a mosaic square at the intersection on Greenwich. We walk up to it until the tiny white stones come together, forming a single word, along with an arrow: “Steps.”
“Mysterious.” Cam looks at me. “Have you ever been up this way?”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
We turn into a quiet cul-de-sac and weave between several large trees to find an open staircase that seems to ascend into the branches.
“This is cool,” I say.
We walk up together, sardined side by side instead of single file.
We both want to see what’s in front of us too much to cede the front spot to the other.
The stairs wind up and up. Yellow flowers dangle from the foliage overhead like strings of heavy lights.
Flower beds with blooms in every color spring up around us.
A life-sized tiger made with mosaic pieces watches from a high ledge.
“This is magical,” Cam says.
The word instantly reminds me of Julia standing at the edge of the mirrored pond inside Golden Gate Park.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
We walk through the garden, past more mosaic sculptures.
The path leads us to a labyrinth-like wall, which only at the last moment reveals a hidden archway to the left.
Cam turns for the arch, but I pause in front of a small copper fountain.
It’s mounted to the false wall and framed in the same style of mosaic tiles.
The shape of the fountain is strange. Familiar.
And those four blue stars and white moon hovering over the tile frame…
“What is it?” Cam asks.
I point at the fountain.
“Remind you of anything?” I ask.
Cam peers at the fountain for a moment, until his eyes go wide. He looks over at me and I nod. I pull my bag around to the front, unzipping the main pocket and taking out the wooden box. We pull out the scroll and open it between us.
We don’t even have to confirm with each other—our focus goes immediately to the drawing of a grandfather clock in the top center, with four stars and a full moon arched over the clockface.
“It’s the clock,” Cam says. “You found another piece!”
He tilts his head into mine, as if we were clinking cheers to the thought.
The map is coming together.