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

by Audrey Claire

  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 has tools and books, and just about every other thing you might need in that store. I remember now. I asked Monica to watch Jake while I ran over to George’s. He stays open a little later than most.”

  “Good.” Ian turned to go.

  “Wait.” I reached for his arm and then remembered just before I made impact that I couldn’t hold onto anything at the present time. Passing through Ian’s arm, though, turned out not to be the issue I faced with the man. Ian seemed to repel me with a force that sent me stumbling backward. An icy chill raced over my being down to the core. I might not feel anything normal like the carpet or the air, but I most certainly felt Ian, and not in a good way. “W-What was that?”

  He hesitated and then said simply, “You cannot touch me in that state. Not presently.”

  “I know, but why didn’t I pass through you like everything else? Is it because you’re a person and not an inanimate object?” I was treating him like an authority on the subject, but he did seem to know a lot. He had registered no real surprise when he saw me, or fear for that matter, and it made me more than curious about him.

  “Hurry to the store,” he said in answer.

  I straightened, annoyed but swallowed the emotion as I wanted to keep his assistance. “Will you go with me?”

  Ian glanced over his shoulder toward the window above the door. I had loved that spot from the first time I stepped into my home because it let in such a strong concentration of sunlight. When Mason and I were still together, I dreamed of changing the front door to the kind with a window to let in more light and having someone cut in a picturesque window for the kitchen. That never happened, and my budget didn’t allow for it now.

  “No, I will not.”

  “Ian, you’ve been very helpful so far, and it would mean a lot if you would go along. If nothing else, at least you’re alive. Please.”

  He gave an odd quirk of his lips at my little speech but kept to his decision not to go. “It is late. I doubt you can make yourself invisible to humans, so go quickly. The town rises early, does it not?”

  A fissure of panic rose in my belly. He was right. Half the population of Summit’s Edge rose at the latest five a.m. I headed toward the door and stopped, unsettled because I couldn’t open the door. I would need to pass through it, which I wasn’t used to. I had visions of banging into the panels and falling on my rump in front of Ian.

  He moved past me and laid a hand on the doorknob. I almost sighed in relief, but he paused, pinning that intimidating gaze on my face. “Listen closely.”

  I nodded.

  “It is crucial that you do not let anyone see you.”

  “Because they’ll be scared out of their mind. Of course.”

  “More than that.”

  “Like?”

  “Banishment.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Banishment?”

  “If you are seen by the wrong person, you could be banished.” He appeared to consider a different way to explain. “Do you know the term exorcist?”

  I felt sick. “Yes.”

  “Similar to that.”

  “But an exorcism is just casting a spirit out of a body, right? I mean, technically, I’m not in a body, so…” I gave a short, shaky laugh, but I saw no humor in the subject.

  “It is where the spirit goes afterward that is important.”

  “I could be sent to a specific place?”

  “Somewhere you do not wish to go, nor can you return from.”

  All of a sudden, I was terrified of leaving the house. Ian opened the door, and I just stood there, staring out into the darkness. I imagined I could feel the evil ready to engulf me and sweep me away to this prison for spirits he had mentioned.

  “Liberty.”

  I opened my mouth to correct him on my name but decided it made no difference. I had to do it. He refused to give me any more help, and I needed to get back into my body. How could I hide from humans? Then a calm came over me. There were no exorcists as he called them in Summit’s Edge. We had two ministers of two different denominations, and they vied for members all the time. I doubted either man could be stirred from their schemes to perform an exorcism on little old me.

  Afraid but determined, I set out into the night and rushed on foot the ten or so blocks to George’s Hardware store. With any luck, I would be back in my body by sunup.

  Chapter Two

  When I reached the road outside my house, I ran and didn’t stop. I crossed to the opposite side of the street and passed Monica’s house. Monica had a green thumb unlike yours truly, so she had placed two huge terra-cotta planters on either side of her front door with colorful flora growing beautifully in them. The red flowers bloomed each spring and complemented my friend’s bright red shutters. I joked that her shutters could be seen from space, but Monica always said that’s just the way she liked it.

  Ian’s warnings played through my mind as I ran, and as I peered into the shadows, beneath cars, behind trees, everywhere since our little residential road held so few lights, I imagined the darkness reached out to me just waiting to swallow me whole. Fear crawled up my back, making me more vulnerable than I had ever been in my life. A few turns onto new roads led me down Memorial, the street where our pesky newspaper reporter Luis Riley lived. I had never had reason to be featured in the local paper, and I did not relish the idea of my debut tonight.

  I suppose I could have just run in a straight line through the walls of the houses between me and the hardware store, but I couldn’t make mysel
f do it. I settled for cutting across lawns and phasing through fences. Could I describe what I did with that term? Phasing?

  At last, I reached Main Street and paused. I thought to pant to catch my breath then realized I was not winded. However, I was tired, but this feeling—a sense of being drained—puzzled me.

  Main Street stretched before me, deserted and dark, all except for blazing lights illuminating the ground outside the hardware store. I drew closer and peered through the oversized window but couldn’t see much past the posters for sales, the hanging plants, which I found odd that George hadn’t brought inside after he closed the night before. Maybe he had already set them out for the morning.

  Along with the posters and plants, there was a display for electric grills, complete with a bald mannequin in an apron, and a lawn chair suspended from the ceiling. I couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind that so I moved toward the front door. With a quick glance up and down the street, I stepped forward through the door, and this time avoided landing facedown on the other side. I peered over my shoulder to find the locks undone. Still, the place lay in total silence. Where was George?

  “More importantly,” I whispered and crouched as I tiptoed toward an aisle, “where is my body?”

  I don’t know why I lowered my voice. Perhaps in case George showed up and had the shock of his life seeing a ghost in his store. I wasn’t worried he could banish me. George was the kind of man who had one thing on his mind most of the time, and that was his business. He loved the hardware store, and when he closed down at one in the afternoon for an hour to have lunch at Gatsky’s across the street, the town’s best restaurant, all anyone ever heard him talking about was the latest tool or the best way to fix a hole in the wall. That was another reason why I had gone to the hardware store. I knew George would give me advice on what tools I needed to fix my leak and maybe even offer to help. Now that I thought of it, I recalled speaking with him about my problem.

  I crept from one aisle to the next. George had secured quite a bit of space for the store, over five thousand square feet. Some speculated the mayor, George’s wife, had supplied him with the money, but George delighted in informing anyone who would listen how with planning and hard work, he was living the American dream as an entrepreneur.

  Past the tow chains with grab hooks and multicolored neon rope, I eventually came across the aisle with PVC pipes and fittings. Why did this feel like the prelude to the board game Clue? Now an image popped into my head of George lecturing me about how old houses contained galvanized steel pipes and how I should have copper piping installed. I had zoned out midway into the lecture and decided that telling him I only wanted to fix the leak would be a waste of time. The rumor was that no one listened to George at home, so he showed off his knowledge with his customers and the patrons at the restaurant. I didn’t blame him really. I had spoken with Mayor Olivia Walsh when she came to the school to talk to the kids about career paths. She had seemed cold and haughty. Somehow I didn’t see her discussing the finer points of steel versus copper.

  I reached the last aisle and didn’t spot my body. Neither did I come across anyone else. The store seemed abandoned, but that was not like George. This was his baby. I decided to thwart the rules and explore beyond the vinyl strip door that sectioned off the back of the hardware store with the customer section, but I stopped in my tracks when I realized only one light had been flipped on in there. Most of the space was cast in shadow with little illumination.

  I stumbled back into the more lighted area and started to call for George. I stopped just short of uttering a sound, remembering my current state. Reaching through to feel along the inside wall I realized even if I did find a switch, I wouldn’t be able to flip it. Then I spotted a panel to my left, just beyond the counter where George held reign. This was where someone had turned off most of the lighting in the back. Either way, I was stuck accepting the situation if I wanted to explore farther.

  The storage section of the hardware store stretched before me. While there were piles upon piles of boxes, I held a good if dim view of the layout from my position. Not unless George played hide-go-seek behind one of the stacks, he wasn’t here. A back exit lay about twenty feet away, door firmly shut. Now what?

  I refused to return home without checking the store completely, so I moved to the first stack of boxes, five across maybe six high. They extended above my head, all with various company names stamped on the sides. Moving around behind them, I searched the narrow area and found nothing but more boxes and shelves built into the wall. I backtracked, frustrated and annoyed but decided to check the opposite side of the room. That’s when I found him. George Walsh lay face down on the floor in a pool of dark liquid. Sticky, wet blood clumped his hair together in the back of his head, and next to him on the floor laid a gadget that looked like a section of pipe with what appeared to be a handle attached. Either way, the device was coated with the same thick blood surrounding George.

  I slapped a hand across my mouth and bent over, sure I would cast up my dinner. I gagged and coughed, shaking from head to toe. I felt a wail coming on, but remembered Ian’s words. When I recalled I had no stomach to vomit from, for some reason it calmed me. I had gone through the reaction based on emotions, feelings that were left over from my physical body and were right now unnecessary. Knowing it brought on the urge to cry, but I held myself together by threads.

  Voices reached me from the front, and I looked toward the vinyl door. Here I was standing over a dead body with no explanation as to what I was doing there. I darted around the boxes to where the shelves were and crouched. Common sense gave me pause. Thinking I had killed George wouldn’t be anyone’s first thought if they saw me.

  Someone stepped into the room, and a man said, “No one here.”

  “I’m telling you, chief. I saw her.”

  I froze. I knew that voice. Sadie Barnett, the most spiteful busybody in Summit’s Edge, a woman who in her mind had reasons enough to dislike me because she hated my mama. Never mind that Mama had passed on to her reward five years ago. Sadie Barnett’s wounds from twenty years back went deep, and she knew how to hold a grudge. Here she was with the chief of police talking about a woman that she had seen come into the store. Had Sadie seen me enter in my ghostly form? I thought not since even her hard heart would likely flutter at seeing such a thing. Maybe she meant someone else. I could only hope.

  “You’re telling me you saw Libby Grace run from this store an hour ago?” the chief asked in a tone that made me think he was reading from his notes. My heart sank. No mistaking it. Sadie blamed me, and when the chief found George’s body, I was in real trouble.

  “Yes, chief. I couldn’t sleep. You know I take prescription sleeping pills my doctor gives me, but I ran low, and I forgot to ask him to fill it.”

  The chief made a noise that to me sounded like “get to the point.” Sadie liked to drone on and on as if her stories were riveting and no one had anything to do other than to listen to them.

  “Well,” she said, in that nasally way that reminded me of nails on a chalkboard. Not that Sadie sounded the same, but rather she had the same affect on my nerves. The fact that she hated me and steered clear of my presence under normal circumstances suited me fine. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel the same about Monica, and therefore I had to hear of Sadie’s dull exploits through my best friend’s lamenting.

  “Well,” Sadie said again, “I thought the evening air would help make me sleepy, and when I came this way, I saw clear as day Libby Grace running out of the hardware store. She looked suspicious if you ask me.”

  “Indeed,” the chief muttered, and I had the feeling he didn’t believe Sadie. “Can you tell me what she was wearing, if she carried anything in her hands?”

  “Oh you mean like if she stole anything?” Sadie said, thoughtful.

  I gritted my teeth. As if I would ever do such a thing. Times were sometimes hard, but I have a better moral code than that! The woman had some nerve. If I had my bo
dy back, I would tell her what I thought of her throwing aspersions on my character. After all it had been Sadie and not me who was suspected of stealing Mama’s spiced apple and raisin pie that caused Mama to lose the bake-off, a decision reversed later on. Sadie had never forgiven the humiliation when the trophy was taken away from her and given to Mama.

  I heard the chief sigh, and I could imagine his frustration. “What was she wearing, Ms. Barnett. Let’s start there.”

  “White sweater, powder blue blouse, and blue denim skirt that almost reached her knees. Libby always was somewhat of a plain Jane.”

  I looked down at myself and saw that Sadie had described me to a tee. My spirit was dressed the same as I had been dressed. Depression hung heavy on my shoulders until I remembered it was possible Sadie had seen me any time during the day to know what I wore.

  “And she didn’t have anything in her hands,” Sadie continued, “but that could mean she already stashed whatever she stole.”

  “I’ll do the interpreting of the facts, Ms. Barnett,” the chief pushed between obviously clenched teeth. I smiled, giving a decisive nod from my hiding spot. There, that would shut her up.

  Sadie harrumphed and muttered something about only wanting to help the law bring criminals to justice.

  “That will be all, thank you,” the chief told her in a decisive tone. Then footsteps sounded closer to where I crouched, and I began to panic. With so little space among the boxes, I had forgotten that were only two directions the chief could take to search the storeroom—where I hid and where George lay dead.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, praying he would take the opposite location first, and when I heard a gasp and a small shriek, I couldn’t be sure right away if the sounds were in reaction to me or at seeing the body. Swallowing, I opened my eyes slowly and glanced up. No one stared down in horror at me. I sagged against a box with relief and tumbled through it.

  “It’s George,” Sadie shouted.

  “Bart,” the chief called to one of the other police officers. “Escort Ms. Barnett out. This is officially a crime scene.”