“No hard feelings,” Lucky said. “I never should have offered my soul in the first place.”
My father didn’t say anything, but I knew he was thinking that no, Lucky shouldn’t have.
Dad turned to me. “Blissful,” he said wearily, his face a map of worry lines, “will you ever forgive me?”
I placed a hand as close to his shoulder as possible without slipping through it. “I already have. You’re my dad and I love you. Though you did say some hateful things back there.”
“They were said in the heat of the moment. I apologize.”
“I accept your apology.”
Lucky took my dad’s arm. “And now, I think it’s time for us to leave and return to where it is we came from. Blissful, if you would do the honors.”
I glanced up at the ceiling and watched as a white light slowly beamed down. A small constellation of stars stirred in the clouds, and the light shone down on Lucky and my dad.
“Goodbye,” I said.
Lucky waved. My father gave me a sad smile before being sucked into the void—a good void, not a bad one.
“Well,” Roan said, slapping an arm over my shoulders, “that went about as well as we could have hoped.”
“Short of us being taken up with them, you mean,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s about the truth.”
“I swear that I’m gonna pay you back,” Sable was screeching at Tex. She held a ghostly candlestick over her head and looked about to hit him with it.
Roan sighed. “Guess I’ll be dealing with that.” Without another word, he strode toward them. “Come on, let’s stop right now. It’s not worth killing him over.”
“Why not?” Sable argued.
I bit back a laugh as Alice and Ruth came over. “Well, Blissful,” Ruth said, “you got the whole thing with your father and Lucky figured out. Pretty good for a night’s work.”
“Yeah, but we still don’t know who killed Zelda, and her poor body is lying in the hallway.”
It was covered with a sheet, but still, she was lying there on the cold, hard floor.
“It’s better than being in the basement,” Alice said. “It was musty in there and then all those TVs.” She shivered. “I’m glad you found us and we didn’t have to spend all night hiding.”
I nodded absently. Alice mentioning the TVs made me wonder exactly what they were.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. “If Roan asks where I am, tell him the basement.”
Without waiting for an answer, I rushed from the room, the tail end of Sable’s conversation with Roan floating in my ears.
“Fine, I’ll leave him alone. Get out of here, Tex,” she blurted out.
Within seconds I was downstairs, standing on the creaking steps. I yanked on the single bulb that filled the space and took a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dim light.
To my right lay the corner where we’d found Ruth and Alice. To my left lay an entirely large room. It looked to be as big as the house itself. I crept down the rest of the stairs and onto the dusty floor.
The basement was as creepy as the attic. Lots of furniture was stored down here, and most of it was covered with sheets. Alice didn’t say the TVs had been covered, so they had to be nearby, though it must have just been Alice who saw them because Ruth never mentioned them.
I kept thinking of what Zelda had said about the elves and thinking about those televisions, and I felt that they were connected. All I had to do was prove it.
I rounded a corner draped with cobwebs and found them. Stationed on a table sat six small television screens—monitors.The elves have eyes, Zelda had said.
She hadn’t been lying. They had hidden cameras in them. Below the monitors sat a control panel. Zelda must have had the security system installed and would come down and watch the rooms. It was my guess that she had spied on every member of her family and that’s how she had known about Luis and Traylor’s affair. But instead of revealing the truth, she had kept the entire thing a secret.
