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 timeIwas feeling smug,hewas 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 façade 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 somethingfeelswrong. 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. Ifeel her head tip up and down as she goes through the same checklist.
