The Ghost and The Graveyard (The Monk's Hill Witch) Read Online Free PDF

last night. Exhaustion? Stress? Radon poisoning? (I’d have to ask my dad about that one.) But it wasn’t ghosts. This was mental.
    I bounded down the stairs, feeling silly I’d ever entertained the idea that there were actually ghosts in the house. As I approached the foyer, a noise from the kitchen snapped me back into jumpy mode. I crouched down, slinking around the banister, and used the island counter as cover. Who the hell was in my house?
    When I realized the sound was the coffeemaker, I stood, confused, and eyeballed my kitchen. The machine was percolating away, sending wafts of hazelnut in my direction. Now I needed to decide between three possibilities. One, I had lost my mind and actually made this coffee myself. Two, a ghost made me coffee. Or three, there was a living person in my house.
    I went with three. “Rick?” I called. Maybe he’d stayed the night. That would explain the voice, as well. “Hello? Is someone here?”
    Silence.
    I started crying again and grabbed the sides of my hair. “Who is in my house?”
    “I am. But I don’t think I should come out. I don’t want to scare you.” It was the man’s voice again, definitely not Rick’s.
    I was afraid, but I was more afraid of losing my mind. “Please,” I said in barely a whisper, “I need to know.”
    An orb of light in the middle of the living room floated toward me. It was the kind of thing you saw every day, dust reflecting the morning glow that seeped through the slats in the blinds. This one, however, grew as it approached in a way that made the room feel like a dark tunnel, and the orb, the light at the end of it. The brightness made me blink, and by the time I opened my eyes again, the transparent form of the smoking man from the night before leaned against my counter.
    Several questions raced through my mind at once. Things like, why was he in my house? Was his body somewhere nearby? Did he mean me any harm? But the only thing that came out of my shocked mouth was, “I can see through you.”
    “Ah, I’m stronger at night. It’s taking an enormous degree of effort for me to hold this form right now. I should be sleeping but I wanted to make sure you were all right. What Prudence did last night was unforgivable.”
    My pulse pounded in my temples. Instinct told me to run. But where would I go? I swallowed hard and rolled with it. “How many of you are there? “
    “Just the two of us.”
    “You and the old woman who called me last night. Prudence.”
    “Yes. I’m sorry we scared you.”
    Was this real? Was a ghost really apologizing to me? He seemed friendly. I tried to think of friendly ghosts, like Casper, so that I didn’t pee in my pants—which, incidentally, were yesterday’s scrubs. I seriously needed a shower.
    “And you switched the wine and made me coffee?”
    “You said you needed the coffee, and that wine choice was a travesty. I had to do something.”
    I wrinkled my brow. “Are you some kind of phantom food critic?”
    “No. To be honest, I don’t know what I was before I died. There are lots of things I don’t remember. But Pinot gris is definitely the better choice with salmon.”
    I folded my arms across my chest. “I like Shiraz.”
    The corner of his mouth curled up in an uneven smile that I found oddly endearing.
    “So, if you are going to be haunting me and choosing my drinks, the least you can do is tell me your name.”
    He frowned and looked at the floor. “I can’t remember.”
    “You mean, you don’t remember who you are—I mean were—at all?”
    “No.” With his transparency, his green eyes hovered like two drops of rain under his lashes. “One day, I was just here. Before that, I don’t know.”
    “But Prudence has a name.”
    “Yes, well, she lived here, so I think she’s more attached somehow to this reality.”
    The story my father told me about the house came back to me all at once. “Holy crow! That’s right. She’s Prudence Clearwater. She’s why I’m here. She