The Girl Who Kept Running

14. The Girl Who Chased Fears

24 September, 2050

Roxie took out the large, marinated roll of beef steak from the fridge and cut along the length into smaller rolls. 

The Kryjowka, the Polish eatery where she secured a part-time job last night. The drill was mouth-watering. Knead the dumplings. Fry the cabbage. Color code the salad. Shape a big ball of beef into dinner. 

Ida the owner-chef. A tester. A teaser. Roxie could take it. 

She stuffed the rolls and laid a batch in the pan.
Snippets of the morning's conversation sneaked through a cloud of savory lemon mist. Shimmer, bubble, fry. 

The Fairy Rock mood had dissipated by breakfast. Brian’s doleful eyes with happy crinkles kept her from turning her angst on to their host. She wanted to slap him, punch him, question him. He had laid the red carpet first then swept it from under her feet. The ground had turned to quartz salt before it could be shaped into a brick. 

Picking through the omelette, Harry had picked the signals she was holding something back. He stayed aloof and himself looked like he had something to hide, which of course he had. He paid her upfront for her promise to keep Brian company and cook up a froth. She played along and left a half full pressure-cooker pot of meaty soup on the stove tame for the master. 

She set about cutting the veggies for goulash in wait for the beef to go gold. 

The pressure was on, though pleasant. Ida had berated the spiaca mysz - her name for the lazy cook - and fired him after tasting the first golabki of her new recruit’s hands. “You may have a shade of Goa in your fingers," she said to Roxie,  "but you'll drive up traffic.” 

With no other help but an old Armenian lady who cleaned and sent out the orders, Roxie knew Ida would juice out her bones before parting with precious money. 

She set about with more zest, swatting away the morning's lingering buzz like flies above the fruit. The kitchen was spacious enough, the breeze rolling in from the sea keeping it cool. She had nice widths of work space on both sides of the stoves and on the central island. 

What on earth was a boy doing without ID documentation of whatever kind in his nest? Kept them strapped on his person all the time, like she had to? What about the cheap Acer? Broken? Not charged? A relic of better times? Her suspicions hung the same as last night, not deepened, nor lightened.

The meat in the pan sizzled. She turned the rolls. One had taken a browner aspect than the luscious gold. She dipped her spatula, and lifted the roll onto Ida's plate, covered that up. Took a knife to the kielbasa for the rice. 

All she'd found were medical records of one Brian Lutwidge Dodgson of Greenwood, Arkansas. Other than that: one old, torn, dog-earned notebook, spineless, no cover back or front. A woman's pretty, pencilled filigree.To the last curling page, it was scribbled through with a sense of haste when thoughts fly by with a train’s speed and the station master stares after. Try as she might, Harry's phone gave too weak a flashlight to read the light graphite mark. 

And that mysterious file. Blue. Sealed. A nonsense phrase jotted down on a scrap affixed to the front. What the hell was a Mandrel Theist? She wouldn't wanna be found out by breaking the seal so no bone there. Instead, she had carefully put back the phone outside, right how she'd found it, then back to a restless sleep. She had heard the rustle outside of the boy's return from his secret tryst. 

She willed her hand to rescue the rolls in time, saute the stew, and stir the sausage into the rice. 

Even the lively bustle of the busy eatery out front couldn't cause a dent to her inward mood. But at last it did. The bustle had turned into a commotion of sorts.