'Nice fellow,' Sam muttered. 'The servants?'
'You mean can we trust them? No, I don't think so. They have all been with Roma for as long as I can remember. Especially Jimmy Perkins. He's a sneak. That's not the right word. He's a zombie.'
'You may be more right than you think about that,' Sam told her. 'Come on—let's see this gun room. I want to see what Falcon has in stock.'
They walked down the dimly lit hall, walking quietly but not stealthily, in case they met someone unexpectedly and aroused suspicion. Nydia stopped him at a doorway.
'The first of the guest rooms in this wing,' she whispered. 'This would be Adam's room. All the boys' rooms are on the left, girls' rooms on the right.'
Sam cautiously opened the door and looked in. The room was deserted. 'You take the girls' rooms,' he told Nydia.
Only Mac and Howard were in their beds. When Sam tried to wake them, he could not. They were sleeping as if drugged. Which, he concluded, they probably were. Across the hall, four young women were in their beds: Judy, Lana, Linda, and Susan. Sleeping soundly. Too soundly. Sam shook Lana gently, then roughly. She could not be roused. He did the same with each of them; they could not be awakened. He noticed the heavy gold medallion on a chain around Susan's neck.
'They're all drugged,' he told Nydia. 'I guess. From now on we'd better be careful what we eat and drink. I'll bet you those trays of food I found outside the door to our rooms were drugged; that's why no one checked on us.
'Mother always uses the buffet line when we have this many guests. At least that's been her routine in the past.'
'Routine can be dangerous,' Sam said, remembering his training. 'Lulls one into a false sense of security.'
Nydia smiled. 'Yes, Sergeant.'
Sam slipped his arm around her waist and let his hand slip down to the curve of her buttocks. He gently caressed her.
'Don't start something you can't finish,' she said. 'And here in the hall would be a perfectly dreadful place to be caught making love.'
Sam removed his hand.
She stopped them before they entered the foyer they had to cross to get to the gun room on the second floor. 'I just remembered something: Falcon has a reject room in the basement. He spends hundreds of dollars—maybe thousands—on guns every year. If there is the slightest flaw: a scratch on the stock, a tiny bit of bluing that's wrong, anything … he won't have it. Just throws it in the reject room and forgets it.'
'He doesn't return them?'
'No, never.'
'That's the place for us, then. Take one of his favorite guns and he'd probably miss it. Where are the servants' quarters?'
'That way,' she said, pointing. 'First floor, in the back.'
'Come on. 1 want to check there, too.'
The servants' quarters were all empty.
'That answers another question,' Sam said. 'Come on, we'd better hurry.' He wondered how long the ceremony at the circle of stones would last.
'It breaks up just before dawn,' she said, reading his thoughts.
'Pretty good gimmick we have going,' Sam said with a grin. 'It may really come in handy before all this is over. I wonder how far we can project and read each other's thoughts?'
'We'll try tomorrow.' She tugged at his arm. 'Today, I mean. Come on, let's get to the reject room.'
Sam selected a good shotgun and a high-powered rifle, then picked a pistol for Nydia. The weapons were all in good condition, except for needing cleaning and oiling. They were fine weapons, from old and skilled manufacturers. He stuffed his pockets with cartridges and had Nydia do the same. She was nervous, wanting to leave, but Sam wanted to prowl. He found a tarp-covered cache of camping equipment, loading them both down with shelter halves and blankets, rope and tent pegs. They filled two packs, then filled two smaller knapsacks. Finally Sam picked up two pairs of binoculars and steered Nydia toward the door.
'I feel like a beast of burden,' she complained on the way back to their rooms. 'Why do we need all these coils and coils of rope?'
Sam stopped in the dimly lit hall.
'What's wrong, Sam?'
'Beast. Why did that word spark something in me?'
'Black hasn't been trying to frighten you, has he?'
'What do you mean?'
'He likes to tell people about monsters that roam the timber in back of the house. No, he wouldn't tell you. He likes to tell girls, frighten them.'
'No, it's more than that. Has something to do with Whitfield. Rumors of Beasts—Devil creatures. Are there beasts in the timber?'
'I … don't know, Sam. I've seen … something. Heard noises and sounds that … were not human, but yet, really not animal, either. But more animal than human. If that makes any sense. And once, when I was about, oh, twelve or thirteen, I suppose, I went walking one afternoon, back where Mother had told me never to go. The smell that
