Chapter Twenty-Six
We emerge through the brick archway and out of the secret garden.
“Come on,” Cam says, turning for downtown.
“Wait.” I motion to the next flight of stairs. “We’re not going all the way to Coit Tower?”
“We don’t need to. The fountain marks a point on the map—just like the Golden Gate Bridge. If we’re going to figure out the rest of it, we have to move to a different part of town.”
The bus back down to Market Street passes us by twice, but neither Cam nor I suggest hopping on. Walking downhill feels almost too easy, too floaty and weightless, to go ruining it by catching a ride.
Something delicious explodes inside me—the first sip of sparkling cider, when it’s all crisp and fizz and hasn’t yet turned into a stomachache. I sneak a look at Cam and am equal parts embarrassed and thrilled to see he’s already looking at me.
“What?” he asks.
“What what?”
“What are you smiling about?”
I make a vague circle with my hands. “Um…everything? Just now? This is real.”
“It was always real,” Cam says.
The ground gives way a little. I feel a hole inside me open, a little window to Cam next to me on the bed, smiling at the corners of his eyes and looking so deeply into mine that my bones turn soft.
This is the way Cam speaks. He pulls on sincerity like a cloak, using some stupid, vague term and acting like it means everything I want it to mean.
Only, when I try it back, when I reach out to him, he runs away so fast that I blink and he’s a dot in the distance.
Nothing was real, I want to say. You wouldn’t have left me if it were real.
My eyes land on a building ahead to focus on. “I mean, the hunt was always real,” I say. “But solving it didn’t feel so real then. Not like it does now.”
“That’s true.” Cam nods. “It does feel different now.”
We walk the next block in silence.
“I think it’s cool we found the fountain especially,” I say after a while.
Cam laughs. “You’re only saying that because I found the bridge and you found the fountain.”
“That’s not true! The bridge is cool too.
I just think the fountain’s neat because it’s hidden.
We had to walk right up to it to recognize it.
Like”—I open Gabriel’s photo of the scroll on my phone and zoom into a corner—“at some point, we might come across a statue of a bear, a snake, and an octopus in a wrestling match. But until then? It’s a totally random part of the drawing. ”
Cam stops walking. “What did you just say?”
“I’m saying, the pictures look really random unless—”
“No! About the octopus!”
I take a step back. “Okay, why are you acting like I’ve committed some serious crime in mentioning the octopus?”
“I didn’t know it was an octopus!” Cam cries out. He looks over my shoulder at the drawing on my phone screen. “I thought it was a bear fighting a pack of snakes!”
Two older businessmen on the opposite side of the street throw us apprehensive glares. I give them a very unconvincing smile in return and close the space between me and Cam.
“I think you’re freaking people out,” I murmur.
He looks from the phone to me, a crazed glint in his eyes. “I know this octopus!” he says.
Before I can react, he pulls one of my hands into his and begins running down the sidewalk.
We run for such a long time that I begin to think that, actually, probably only elite runners could run this far, and maybe I should have been on the cross-country team, maybe even some Olympic-level team.
Then we get to a crosswalk intersection and I realize we’ve only run a single block, and I would never in this lifetime have made the cross-country team.
But, really, screw the cross-country team anyway, because they’re all just show-offs.
Then the walk sign turns green and we repeat the whole thing again.
Finally, Cam pulls me off the sidewalk.
“Here!” he yells.
He brings us over to a high stone column standing in the middle of a triangular plaza.
At the top of the column is a small statue of an angel, arms outstretched as she holds a book overhead.
At the bottom of the column is a large statue of a boy waving a pickaxe in one hand and an American flag in the other. I read the inscription below the boy.
“The Unity of Our Empire Hangs on the Decision of This Day” —W. H. Seward
On the Admission of California, U.S. Senate, 1850
“Okay…” I say slowly. “What does it mean?”
“Who cares?” Cam answers. He’s already circling to the other side of the column. I roll my eyes.
“Of course you wouldn’t care—”
“Octopus!” Cam screams. “Octopus octopus octopus!”
Nearly the entire faction of people around us twist over their shoulders to give Cam worried stares.
“Shut up!” I hiss as I step around the column next to him. “You sound like a little kid at an aquarium touch pool.”
Cam blinks at me. “They don’t let people touch the octopi.”
He steps to one side and motions with his entire body, arms fully out, toward our second fountain of the day.
A bear head juts from the smooth stone face, water trickling from its open mouth.
A snake entwines over the top of the bear’s head like a victory crown.
Just below the basin of the fountain, an octopus made of copper curls into a tangled little ball where the column meets the sidewalk.
“Well?” Cam asks.
“Well, I’d say the bear and the snake absolutely kicked the octopus’s ass in that wrestling match.”
Cam huffs. It’s surprisingly delightful to see him so flustered. He turns again to the fountain, studying the little mangled octopus on the ground. Then he looks left, the way we came.
“Where’s Golden Gate Bridge?”
I do a slow spin. “That way,” I say, pointing over my shoulder.
Cam follows my finger. He frowns.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he mutters. He holds up his palm. “Can I see the scroll again?”
I sit on one of the plaza benches and take the box out from my bag, then pass the scroll over. He unrolls it carefully, then shifts it back and forth, like he’s turning a steering wheel.
“Shoot,” Cam says after a while. “I guess it’s not a map, after all.”
I lean into him. “What do you mean?”
“Look where the bridge is. And then here’s the mosaic fountain near Coit Tower. If I shift the drawing to make them line up…”
“It’s impossible,” I say, finishing the thought. I point to the bear, snake, and octopus on the page. “That would be sitting out in the middle of the water.” I look up at Cam. “Hey! You think there might be another column or fountain like this out on Treasure Island?”
Cam shakes his head. “No chance.” He sighs and taps the woman in the long dress again, the one wearing the necklace with the key. “We have to find her,” he says.
I nod. “Yeah, we do.”
We catch the Judah train on Market Street and begin to head home. But right before we reach Sunset Tunnel, Cam tugs the stop line and stands up.
“Let’s hang out at Duboce Park,” he says. “For old times’ sake.”
My stomach wrings itself like a washrag. “I’m not sure.”
“Please?” Cam presses his palms flat together, then extends one arm out toward me. “What if there’s a hidden statue of a lady we don’t know about?”
“In a dog park?”
“Yeah! The patron saint of dogs or something.”
The closing-doors bell rings out. Before I can overthink it, I’ve left my seat alongside Cam and leapt off the train. I watch it drift away into Sunset Tunnel.
Cam lets go of my hand. Our knuckles sweep across each other.
The lightness of the touch nearly makes me jump.
I take a deep breath and look over at the park.
Dogs are running, free and happy, all over the place while their owners stand in clusters, chatting and holding dangling leashes in their arms.
“I don’t see a statue,” I say.
Cam shrugs and offers a meek smile. “Let’s look around anyway.”
We start down the winding path that cuts across the grass.
“You know,” Cam says. “You’re not the only one who did research that summer.”
“Is that right?” I ask.
Cam nods. “The reason I kept bringing us back here to look is because of Harvey, actually.”
I stop walking. “What?”
“Yeah. He took a famous photo right…about…here.” Cam hops off the path and draws a circle in the grass with his shoe.
“It was a publicity stunt to help get public parks cleaned up in 1978. Harvey invited a reporter to Duboce Park, and then, during the photo shoot, he stepped in dog poop ‘by accident.’ But, really, he wanted to make a point about how gross the parks were getting. It helped pass his bill.”
I pin my hands over my hips. “Are you saying you thought the treasure would be buried under a pile of dog poop?”
“Historically significant dog poop!” Cam says.
He pauses and looks at me, and after a full second of silence, the two of us completely break down in laughter.
We’re each doubled over, tears streaming.
Several of the dogs hear us and bound over, thinking we’re playing some sort of game.
One jumps onto my side, and I tumble forward into Cam.
He catches me around the middle and we land on the grass, still laughing and breathing heavily.
Another dog comes over and licks Cam’s cheek.
The owners whistle and wave their dogs away, leaving Cam and me tangled in the grass.
For a moment, I don’t want to move. My limbs are sleepy and heavy against Cam’s body.
The warmth of his chest feels like gravity pulling me closer.
We got into this configuration purely by accident, but now any move either of us makes feels like a decision.
I have no idea what Cam’s thinking next to me. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, wild and thrumming, then slowly coming back down to a steady thump, thump, thump. We both gaze up at the sky.
“I didn’t know you did your own research,” I say.
“I like doing research,” Cam answers.
The clouds slice through the sky like ships. The combination of wind from the ocean and the cross breeze from the bay moves them so quickly that it’s like watching a time-lapse video. I keep my thoughts up in the clouds, far away from my body, trying to figure out this whole situation.
We could keep wandering through the city like this, checking behind trees and buildings again, the way we did that summer.
Or, now that we have the images in front of us, we could speed things up.
I know Cam and this hunt—he’s like me. He doesn’t want to wade through it. He wants to get right to the end.
“The San Francisco History Center opens on Tuesday at noon,” I say aloud.
I remember Gabriel telling us the hours, then explaining how we couldn’t possibly cut school to go before Saturday.
I remember how frustrated and lonely I felt right then, like no one cared about the hunt the way I did.
“It’s filled with old photos of landmarks and monuments around the city. If you like that kind of research.”
Cam twists toward me without untangling us.
“I like that kind of research,” he says steadily.
And to my credit—even though his voice is low and sounds like velvet, and he’s giving me that same deep look and stretching those words into things I’m certain he doesn’t really mean—I simply nod and sit up in the grass.
“Okay, then,” I say. “Let’s make our case to the group tomorrow. We could find the exact answer to this whole thing by Tuesday night. We could actually do this.”
Cam smiles and sits up with me. “Let’s actually do this.”