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 skeletonkeys 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 danglein 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 theGay Treasuresbook. 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 thepictures 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 inGay 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 firstAat the Hamilton Fish Play Center sign in Manhattan, where MarshaP. 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:
