Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

always look as if they’re disappearing into nothing, that stepping onto them is stepping over a cliff.
    I wouldn’t look at the slip until we were on the MAXspeeding back toward Portland. There was a bunch of writing on it, stuff that we couldn’t make any sense of, then this: Dbl T Car Sy XX Fmy Latte.
    Chelsea grabbed it out of my hand. She had no trouble deciphering the code. “Double Tall Caramel Soy Extra-Foamy Latte. That’s it. I’m positive. I remember thinking,
What’s with the extra foamy business? Aren’t lattes already like halffoam?
”
    The time stamped on it was 10:27, and the name on it was Sylvia Soto.

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    â€œShe totally looked like a Sylvia. I’m sure that’s her,” said Chelsea. She kept clapping her hands together. “This really kicks serious willy.”
    â€œKicks serious
willy
?” I snorted with laughter.
    â€œThey say it all the time in London, all right?”
    Finding the receipt with Sylvia’s name on it may have kicked serious willy, but by the time we arrived at the MAX stop near Chelsea’s house, I’d run out of ideas. We had Sylvia Soto’s name, but now what? The sun was still a gray ball behind the clouds. I retied my hair in a knot on top of my head. Chelsea could barely sit still. She kept wishing aloud for some hand sanitizer. She wanted to go home and change her clothes.
    Since I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I said that sounded like a good idea. I figured we could useChelsea’s computer to Google Sylvia Soto. That would probably be the best way to find her.
    Casa Clark was big and old, but Chelsea’s house was really big and really old. It was the dictionary definition of rich. Look it up and there you will see the big brick porch, the white pillars, and dark green door. It looked as if a president of something might live there. Her street was wide, with ancient trees shading the sidewalk.
    Inside Chelsea’s house it smelled like lemon and ammonia. Everything was matchy matchy. The two white sofas in the living room matched each other, and the coffee table and the end tables all matched. Even though there were genuine paintings on the walls—close-ups of the insides of different flowers—they also seemed to match.
    You could tell that this was not a house where someone said “Hey, look at this cool poster of the Ramones” or whatever, and stuck it on the wall just because it was fun to look at. Maybe that’s the difference between having a mom on the premises full-time and living in a house run by boys. Chelsea de Guzman did not have a life-size cardboard James Bond in his tuxedo in her entryway, like we did.
    No one was home except the housekeeper, who was in the kitchen … doing guess what? … cleaning out the refrigerator. Chelsea introduced us.
    â€œMinerva, Agata. Agata, Minerva. Do we have anyhand sanitizer?” Chelsea motioned washing her hands, and Agata nodded toward the corner of the kitchen sink. The kitchen was all white with a huge stainless steel refrigerator and stove. It looked both plain and fancy at the same time. It reminded me of a laboratory. There were no magnets of creepy critters on the fridge.
    â€œWhere are Louis and Jeanette?” asked Chelsea, squirting a worm of the clear sanitizer gel into her narrow palms. At the Clark house, we would have just turned on the tap, run our hands beneath whatever temperature water came out, and called it clean. I knew Louis was Mr. de Guzman and I assumed Jeanette was Chelsea’s mom.
    Agata shrugged. “Not here,” she said. Agata was about a foot shorter than me and from a foreign land. She didn’t wear a housekeeper uniform, like you see in the movies, but a long-sleeved white blouse and black slacks. I didn’t recognize her accent. She was cleaning a bottle of soy sauce with a towel and Windex, as if it was a window that everybody had to look through all the