The Hidden Toxin ✔(#6 in the Our Side of The Dice Series)

Chapter 14: The Lace Pantie Case

One week later

"Come and join us for zavtrak before you leave!" the hostel owner, a woman in her sixties, calls Yemisi to the kitchen in her coarse accent, She is setting the table with dishes. The dishes are Beef Stroganoff and a Russian beetroot soup known as Borscht.

Yemisi knew immediately that the woman was calling her for breakfast because the woman used the word zavtrak a lot which was the Russian word for breakfast.

The Beef Stroganoff dish looks appetizing. It consisted of sautéed pieces of beef served in a sauce with smetana known as sour cream, and the beetroot soup had dozens of ingredients: meat, sautéed vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes.

Yemisi and Ebun had spent one week at Hostel Pavlov, Moscow, Russia, and it was one hell of an experience. First, its location was suspicious. It was a six-store building hidden between the hills after a long drive through a narrow road. The dunes by the sides were a brick red color with cactus plants all around.

Strange. It wasn't a place anyone would like to tread upon as it looked like a journey to hell, so Yemisi was courageous enough to have sojourned that far. The hostel being the end product of her search, looking pleasing on the exterior. The interior was okay for an average hostel. Probably a bit impressive, but the rooms, especially the rooms allocated to Yemisi and Ebunoluwa on the sixth floor, were in horrendous conditions.

Aside from the fact that there were no elevators and had to carry their luggage single-handedly to the sixth floor, the empty rooms had gigantic cobwebs and dusty furniture.

In addition to that mess, the sockets available were not working, so they had to go all the way downstairs to charge their phones. The window panes were stiff, and the glass shattered when they tried to open it for cleaning.

The straw that broke the camel's hind limbs (as the camel's back isn't the most befitting idiom to describe the condition) was the clogged toilets.  Yemisi paid the hostel owner additional bucks to secure a better room, but those were the only two rooms available in that hostel.

Yemisi and Ebun didn't have a choice but to clean up their temporary rooms to the best of their abilities. More importantly, Yemisi had to fulfill her mission of staying in Russia for a week, so each day, she strolled around the neighborhood and asked random people the strangest questions. She asked about who drove by the streets often and even enquired for names of famous people, both good and bad.

Yemisi walked around and searched for hidden avenues. She journeyed through abandoned storehouses, empty amusement parks, and even churches under construction. Places that have felt Ebun was likely to be in either as a victim or as a perpetrator. She gave her phone number to people who lived around those places, so they could reach her if they found Ebun around those places and got a suspicious vibe.

Yemisi provided descriptions of her sister as well, so it would be easy for the people to know Ebun. Yemisi knew her actions might not be completely safe as the people she conversed with might be evil-doers themselves, so she tried using money to buy the loyalty of a few with hopes that it wouldn't backfire on her.

Thankfully, most of these people were English-speaking Russians because they were educated and had learned English. In situations where she encountered someone that spoke bits of the Russian language in their sentences, there was always someone nearby to translate what it meant. Moreover, Yemisi learned bits of the language fast because the hostel owner's daughter was always translating every Russian word her mother said.

Yemisi even thought of taking the hostel owner's daughter everywhere with her for translation purposes if she met people who only spoke Russian but figured that something might go wrong. It was best she knew nothing because there was a tendency she might become friends with Ebun.