“What is this? Am I in charge of digging now?”
“Obviously not,” Cam says, mimicking my voice. He picks up my roller bag by the handle and hoists it the rest of the way across the golfing green. I can hear the things inside shift and clatter, but Cam doesn’t complain about the weight even once.
We reach the base of the hill. Cam drops my bag and climbs up to the pile of sticks he placed along the hillside. He pulls out a printed photo from his pocket and holds it against the backdrop. I set down his shovel and scramble up next to him.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Printout,” he says. “From the microfilm reader.”
“You went back to the library?”
Cam lowers the photo and looks at me. “Oh, come on, like you didn’t?”
I swallow. “I did. I just figured you would be too busy to go there again.”
His jaw tenses. “Itoldyou, I like research too. You just don’t listen to me.”
“Yes I do! You’re the one—”
The Park official claps her hands from the base. We both jump and turn to her.
“You have one hour!” she calls to us.
Cam and I nod briefly and head back for our tools. I unzip my suitcase and pull on my gardening gloves. Cam moves the sticks aside and tips his shovel into the ground.
“You’re sure about this?” I ask.
“Oh, shut up, Ivy.”
He chops up and down through the grass, creating a two-foot-by-two-foot square. We set the sod carefully to one side, then bring a plastic tarp next to the gaping hole we’ve just made in the ground. From there, Cam’s in charge of moving each shovel-load of dirt. He grabs as much as he can, then shifts so I can come in and break up the packed earth with one of my trowels. We actually make a ton of progress using this method in the first twenty minutes, to the point where even the Park official has abandoned her camp chair to sit near us and point out anything that looks remotely interesting.
Then, forty minutes in, we hit a wall.
Not awallwall. But a level of dirt so horribly, densely packed that it may as well be a wall.
Cam shifts the loose soil and I keep chipping away, but we go from moving full shovel-loads to handfuls, and then to the equivalent of dirt crumbs. I only manage a single scrape on my last turn. When Cam approaches, he doesn’t even try to move the loose soil away.
Instead, he tosses his shovel aside and climbs directly into the hole. He tucks his arms and legs in. Only the top of his head pokes out.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
My hands ache and we’ve found absolutely nothing, but there’s still a firm countdown on the clock. According to the official’s watch, we have less than fifteen minutes to dig.
Cam rubs his hands over his thighs.
“It’s not here.”
“Yes it is,” I say. “We can’t give up now. We are literally ten minutes away—”
“Away from making a slightly deeper hole,” Cam finishes. He shakes his head, resigned. “But it’s just not here.”
I let my trowel fall onto the grass. “Well, who made you boss, Cam? When did we decide that because you’re the one who found the book, you get to call all the shots?”
He gazes up at me, pondering.
“You know what?” he says slowly. “I am so done with this argument.”
“Well, so am I!”
