It’s an old sepia photo of a large, empty room. Rows of long tables with matching sleek chairs stretch from the foreground and into the distance. Every wall around the tables is filled with built-in wooden bookshelves, which are stacked, top to bottom, with books. The small metal plaque under the framed photo readsInterior of Main Library—Reading Room, 1917.
I step closer to the picture.
If the visitor guide is right and this room held all the books in the main library, then that means Gilbert Baker’s clue might have been connected to one of those built-in bookshelves. I look around me at the marble walls and giant floor-to-ceiling windows. The bookshelves are clearly no longer here.
But there’s something else going on. As I study the photograph, I recognize the windows next to us are the same windows from 1917. Intricate checkered patterns and all. Only, the windows don’t go all the way from the floor to the ceiling in the photo, the way they do now. They ran from the ceiling and stopped halfway down the wall, where the built-in bookshelves took over. I pull out the map of the museum again.
“I think…I think they cut this room in half,” I say.
Sunny scratches her head. “That’s weird. It doesn’t look like it’s a half room.” She glances back toward the Japan wing. “Where’s the other half?”
“It’s below us.” I read from the guide. “The Osher Foundation Gallery on the first floor. They cut the room in halfhorizontally!”
“What?” Sunny walks over to me and Julia. “Why would they do that?”
“Well, look how open it was.” I point to the framed photo. “No one needs ceilingsthathigh, especially when you can use the extra space for something else. Come on. We need to go see if the shelves are still down there.”
Gabriel snaps a picture of the photo and its caption on the fancy camera, then we all take the side staircase down. The stairwell ends on the first floor, directly across from the entrance to the Osher Foundation Gallery. I pause outside the entryway. We’ve figured out the mystery of the old library. This—this room right in front of us—is where Gilbert wanted his treasure hunters to look. And whatever he put there, if it’s gone, then that’s it. The San Francisco mystery will go unsolved forever.
“Now or never,” Gabriel says next to me. He offers a reassuring smile.
We head through the doorway.
Julia takes a deep, sharp inhale as soon as we step inside. “This ishuge,” she whispers.
She’s right. Samsung Hall, the room right above us, felt towering and grandiose, but that was sort of the point. The room in front of us now is dark and expansive, more like a labyrinth or a cave. It seems nearly endless.
My heart swells as I look around, because, apart from the lack of windows, there’s another reason this room is so dark. The original mahogany built-in bookshelves cover every single wall.
“The treasure’s still here,” I say out loud.
It has to be.
It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust from the bright windows upstairs to the cool, cozy feeling of spotlights scattered throughout the room. A few other people mill around in the shadows, reading the description cards and considering the works of art. I glance at the security guard in the corner, then gather Sunny, Gabriel, and Julia close.
“We have to check all the shelves,” I whisper. “Can you show me the photo again?” I ask Gabriel. “The one from upstairs?”
He nods and passes the camera over. I match up the doors we just came through with the main entrance in the photograph. There’s a built-in reference desk next to the doors in the photo. I look up. The desk is gone now. But maybe I can use this as a starting place. The Dewey decimal system poster from the library had call numbers from zero all the way up to a thousand. I remember that the first set of numbers were reference materials. Wouldn’t that section start behind a reference desk?
“Zero to a hundred,” I whisper, pointing to the section of shelves next to the doors, where the reference desk used to be. I point to the next section over. “One hundred to two hundred. Two hundred to three. Three to four.”
I pivot with each section, my finger sweeping over slices of the room like a clock hand.
Five to six, six to seven…
“Seven to eight hundred.”
I’m pointing at a random section of shelves across the room from us. “I think that’s where the architecture section used to be.”
Gabriel squints across the room, then looks back down at the photograph on his camera.
“What’s that?” he asks.
In the photo, just above Gabriel’s finger, there’s a small, round pipe sticking out below the shelves. Exactly where a person would find the books marked 723.
I look up at the gallery in front of us and see something metallic glinting near the floor.
“I’m going to check it out,” I say. “Cover me.”
