Frank heads out to the car.

"Alright. Here goes." Zoe heads out, looking around Trammel's house to see if there's anyone visible.

She spots four guards making their rounds around the building.

Zoe points out the guards to Carrie, then sneaks to the building, carefully avoiding the guards. 

She is crouched against the side of the conservatory in the dark.

Carrie is not so lucky.

"Hello!" the guard says. "What are you doing here?" He points his gun at Carrie.

Oh No should she keep herself hidden and try to get in on her own or should she abort everything and try to save Carrie from getting shot?

"--you're one of the people poking around Mr. Trammel's estate," the guard says. He grabs Carrie by the wrist. "We know what to do with people like you."

Not going quietly with the guard for now would attract more guards to this location, who might notice Zoe who is currently successfully hiding.

So Carrie does not resist and the guard drags her off to fates unknown.

Shit. Okay. Now she has to rescue Lacie AND Carrie. She hopes they put them in the same place??? Zoe checks that the coast is clear, then attempts the lock and hopes that it is not alarmed.

Okay. Steady.

The lock opens easily and beautifully in her hand and she enters the conservatory.

The conservatory is glass-walled and juts out from the eastern side of the house to catch the morning sunrise. Dozens of exotic African plants grow: a brightly-colored and prehistoric-looking protea; the tall near-black Nile lily; the small pretty white blooms of a nemesia.

There's no one in the conservatory.

Pretty. She'll stay low and try to keep plants between her and any windows as she heads for the library door.

She listens carefully at the door and looks through the windows, but doesn't see anything. 

Zoe tries to pick the library lock. Ugh, she almost has it, but these pins aren't staying in place! She starts raking the lock instead of individually setting each pin.

Her lockpick snaps off in the lock. No one is going to be able to open this door.

Cheap piece of crap. Okay, now what.

Maybe she can open a window...? She tries to fiddle with the clasp but can't figure it out. 

Fuck this library! 

She takes out a glass cutter from her urban exploration kit, very carefully removes enough glass from the window that she can enter, and goes into the library.

The library is full of shelf after shelf of books: occult, history, anthropology, theology, all of the sciences. The books are well-thumbed and obviously well-referenced. The Gaze of Azathoth rests on a comfortable plush armchair, with a bookmark showing where the reader is in the book. Across the far wall, Zoe sees a painting of a starfield and nebula as viewed from someone standing in a field of blue moss growing on strange purple rocks. She recognizes it from the lockbox photos; it was hanging on the wall at Ramon Echavarria’s mansion.

Zoe places the carefully cut out pane under a chair or something. Somewhere it won't fall and break.

There sure are a lot of spooky books here. She hopes Anemone and Mordred have fun with that.

...they were going to be showing up soon, right??

She looks back through the window she came through and sees if she sees anyone.

She doesn't see anyone.

GUESS IT'S ALL UP TO HER.

So there was supposed to be a trapdoor down to the cellar somewhere around here, right? 

Zoe debates shoving some books in her bag, since it seems like no one else is coming to get them, but then she remembers how books apparently sometimes SPONTANEOUSLY CATCH FIRE when you pick them up and decides not to. And she opens the trapdoor and looks down into the cellar.

She mostly sees the floor, with a few people standing in the room. They're walking around and talking, though she can't make out the sound. One of them seems to have a knife.

Ugh. She wishes she had backup for this.

She's not really sure where she's supposed to go once she's in the cellar? Should she just drop down and start shooting? She doesn't see how she could get down there without them seeing her...

She is going to... wait. And see if they leave or change anything. And in between checking in she will poke around the library. She wants to get a closer look at the painting, and see if she can get any useful books in her bag. If she's going to have to cut and run she may as well have something to show for it.

She has the warding stone in her pocket and she is MAKING SURE it is close to any spooky books when she touches them.

Last time there was a spooky book and they took it away from the stone it was Bad.

Really wish anyone who knows their way around a book were here.

The painting seems like a pretty normal weird creepy painting.

Skimming the spines  of the books is giving me a bunch of stuff like "Temples to Yum Kaax" which she cannot tell whether that is a normal god or an evil cult god. She starts flipping through pages on the most likely looking books to get a better idea and manages to recall enough from her conversations with Lacie to identify the most important books and put them in her bag.

She sees a vision.

In the night sky above, a vast, purple gas giant hangs in the middle of brilliant white stars. In the center of that impossible mass a giant eye gazes down. Or perhaps it is multiple eyes, twisting away in fractal eddies which dance amidst the purple gases? Or a black hurricane which tears apart the world above; its implication of destructive forces beyond the ken of man seeming to sweep low across the landscape before her.

Zoe flings the book away from her.

She is going to hide under the desk in the study for a bit she thinks.

The art on the walls and the rugs on the floor give the impression that the person who owns this house is very wealthy and very powerful and would like you to know all about it. A chair is pulled up to the desk for visitors; it looks like it was deliberately designed to be uncomfortable. The desk itself is bare except for a fountain pen; the papers must be hidden in the locked drawers.

Didn't Oswald say that the desk in his father's study was locked and that he was not allowed to look at it? Maybe she will pick the lock on the desk from anyone her book throwing may have alerted.

Or... maybe she can find a key? She checks that first, but there are no keys conveniently left on or around or taped to the underside of the desk.

Alright. NEW lockpick that is less broken and hopefully less flimsy. She tries to pick it and it snaps off inside the lock AGAIN. She is going to get a more durable set of lockpicks.

And then something catches her eye.

It seems Mr. Trammel was not quite as good at putting things back in their drawers as he should have been.