Audrey Claire - Libby Grace 01 - How to be a Ghost Read Free

way, with a capital D. I figured I heard him wrong and let it pass.
    “Do you feel a connection with your body?”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant by a connection. In fact, I didn’t feel anything. Not the floor beneath my feet, not the evening air, nothing. I let out a whimper at this but stopped myself just in case I lapsed into the wail. Even if Ian was crazy, I didn’t want to take chances.
    “I don’t know.” Desperate to distract myself from my situation and to keep him with me until inspiration struck on how to fix it, I said, “Tell me how you performed the trick.”
    “What trick?” The man continued to speak in a superior tone as if he tolerated me. I bristled at the insult but was still determined that he was my only lifeline, if one could call it that.
    “You unlocked my door. I saw the lock turn, and there was no key when the door opened.” I squinted at him. “ Did you use a key?”
    He watched me in silence. I had the feeling he debated telling me the truth.
    “You need to get your body back. Having you out of it is an inconvenience to me.”
    At that point, I was ready to toss him out on the street and go it alone. “Inconvenience? What is that supposed to mean?”
    He made no move to speak and stood so still he might have been a statue. I folded my arms under my chest and decided to wait him out then gave a silent whoop of triumph when he spoke first.
    “Where were you when you lost it?”
    Was I really having this conversation? “I’m not sure.”
    “Think about it, Liberty.”
    I bristled. “No one calls me Liberty. I’m Libby.”
    He made no indication that he would comply with the request.
    Pacing, I thought over the day before. I had worked at the school as usual, and when Jake and I left there, he had begged for ice cream as dessert. Since he had shown me an A on his last math test, I figured ice cream was a great reward. We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to pick up Cookie Dough flavor for Jake and Black Cherry for me. Then what happened? I wracked my brain, worried that maybe I’d had a stroke or something that shorted out my memory just before I died. Not that I had any idea if what happened to a person physically affected their soul after death. This was all new to me.
    Death . Just thinking the word set my teeth on edge and gave me an urge to sink into the floor in despair. Then I remembered Jake. The sooner I figured this mess out, the better for him.
    “I came home and…” I chewed my lower lip, struggling to recall, and then it hit me. “The leak! I had a leak in the bathroom beneath the sink.”
    Ian nodded. “So you called a plumber? Did you check in the bathroom?”
    I raced toward the bathroom with visions of finding my body there unconscious after a phantom plumber clunked me over the head for some reason. Mustard-colored shaggy carpet in front of the sink matched a cover for the back of the toilet and tank, which offset the cream paper on the walls and gay trimming toward the ceiling. I rethought the entire yellow theme outside my body. Décor aside, my body was not there, but the drip was, plopping steadily into the small rectangle tub beneath the sink.
    My heart sank, but Ian prompted me to search the rest of the house. He followed, moving behind me without sound. Jake in his bedroom and Monica stretched across my bed asleep, what little else there was to explore, we covered in a few minutes. Hope sprung to life once we entered the front hall again.
    “What was I thinking? I can’t afford a plumber.”
    Ian’s expression said I couldn’t afford not to hire one.
    I raised my chin. “I have watched plenty of home improvement shows on TV. I know with a few tools and maybe a book on how to fix a leak, I could get it done in a jiffy.”
    “If that was your logic,” he said, and I knew he was being generous using the word logic, “then you would have gone to buy the tools and book.”
    “Yes!” I almost clapped my hands. “George’s Hardware. Of course. George