Page 62 of Hot Summer's Prey

“Narnia!” Anelisa cheers.

Pacari and I share another glance, both of us growing a little frustrated with my friends. “What’d you find, Dawn?”

Maybe if we humor her, we’ll get Slugger back faster.

“I found… the Lighthouse,” she says with great drama.

The others respond in kind, letting out a collective, “oooooh!”

“Where?” Zephyr asks first.

“Do you want to see it?” Dawn asks, barely able to control her excitement.

“Dawn, you’re gonna kill us, but we really need to grab the dog and go,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Can we see it when we get back?”

“It’s real quick! C’mon, I’ve been working on this all week! Don’t ruin my fun,” she says, joking but also very serious.

“Dawn, it’s super important,” I say, stepping forward.

She looks really pissed. I feel incredibly bad. She must be extra mad at me because I didn’t tell her much about the smuggler caves, but there are some pretty high stakes going on, so she’s going to have to wait.

“Teresa,” Anelisa nudges. “It’s not like whatever you’re doing is life or death. Just humor her.”

I try not to scream, it is, though!

Pacari looks at me, shakes his head. Looking back at Dawn, she looks like she’s about to cry. I let out a huge sigh.

“Okay, yes, real quick,” I grumble.

“Yay! Okay, can someone hold this dog, I need both my hands,” Dawn says quickly.

Pacari and I both reach for Slugger, but I get him first.

“Let’s go,” Pacari whispers.

“Let her just do her thing real quick,” I whisper back, a little pit forming because I feel so stuck between my friend and my lover.

Staring into my eyes, he sighs and nods. “Okay. Real quick.”

“Thank you,” I whisper back and give him a peck on the lips.

We linger a little too long. Following the back of the pack as everyone else went through the basement door ahead of us, I’m thrown off by how cold it is as soon as we get down the stairs.

“I didn’t even know buildings with basements existed in California,” Taara says from the front.

“Aren’t they illegal?” I ask.

“If you’re running a speakeasy, I don’t think you care about laws,” Anelisa points out.

“There’s actually clear guidelines in the foundational code,” Dawn says. “So it’s not illegal. During the post-war housing boom, builders just cut down time on laying down houses by skipping the basement. And it’s a little more complex to build a basement cause of the frost line and San Andreas.”

“How do you just know this stuff?” Taara asks, shocked. “That’s so niche.”

“…I looked it up when I found out this place had a basement, because I also thought basements just didn’t exist in California.”

Taara laughs, then Anelisa laughs at Taara thinking Dawn is just this big encyclopedia.

“Did I make a joke?” Dawn asks.

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