“You’re kidding,” Joe said.
“I’m not. Dick Kizer was one of two Wyoming soldiers in that unit. He landed at Normandy and stayed with the regiment all the way across Europe. They were the first Americans to enter Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, where one of them—a guy from Casper, believe it or not—stole two of Hitler’s personal photo albums and brought them back.”
Joe was stunned by the implication. “So did Dick Kizer take the album that was dropped off at your library?”
“I don’t know for certain, of course, but it’s possible. He was there in Berchtesgaden.”
Joe felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold evening. There had been enough spare room in the locker for the album to have been there. He thought of how pressed the uniform had been, as if something heavy and flat had weighted it down for years before it had been removed.
He asked, “Why would Bert decide yesterday, after all these years, to donate that album to your library if that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Marybeth said. “But maybe he did it because he thought someone was going to come and take it from him. Maybe he did it just a couple of hours before the bad guy showed up at his house and tortured him until he told him where it was?”
* * *
—
“Stay with me on this,” Marybeth said, racing ahead. “Let’s say that Bert somehow found out that somebody was coming for his father’s photo album. How he learned that, I have no idea. But his reaction to the possibility was to get the album out of his house and leave it somewhere secure where no one would make a big deal of it. Believe it or not, that’s one reason people trust our library. They trust us to be discreet.
“So Bert does this early yesterday morning. He thinks he’s found a safe place for it. Maybe his intention was to come back later and retrieve it. Or maybe he hoped we’d send it on to some national archive so no one could get to it. I don’t know his thinking.”
“I’m following you,” Joe said, urging her on.
She said, “Bert goes home after dropping off the album to find a guy—or maybe a couple of guys—waiting for him. I’m going to say it was at least two men because I don’t think one guy could do to Bert Kizer what was done to him, do you?”
“No.”
She said, “They strong-arm him and demand the album. For whatever reason, he won’t tell them anything at first. But when he won’t hand it over, they get nasty with him. Why it means so much to them, we don’t know. And we don’t know how they knew he even had it. It obviously means enough to them that they torture him for it. At some point he breaks and tells them what he did with it. But they can’t just let him go. He’s seen their faces. Maybe they even told him why they want it. So they take him out back and set him on fire and dispose of the body. Then,” she said, leaning in close to Joe, “they drive to my library. By this time, they know we have it.”
“Go on.”
“So what are they going to do?” she asked. “Are they going to storm a public library and start asking about a package that was left on the doorstep? Would they call that kind of attention to themselves in a public place knowing what they just did to a poor old man? No, I think they did surveillance. They were watching for me the entire time.”
Joe felt another chill. “They saw you take it out of the building in a Twelve Sleep County Library tote bag. Then they followed you at least to our access road.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” she said. “But they’re not from here. They knew what road I took, but they didn’t know there was another house at the end of it. Maybe they looked into Lola’s trailer and saw the tote bag and thought it belonged to me.”
“Oh no,” Joe said. “They killed Lola for a bunch of romance novels instead of a Nazi photo album.”
“And if they’re desperate and violent enough to kill two old people because of it, I doubt they’ll just go home,” she declared. “They realized they’d made a mistake—that they’d gone to the wrong house. So at least one of them came back this morning to scout things out. That was the gargoyle.”
“Whew,” Joe said. “I’ve got to really think this over. This is a lot to digest.”
“There could be holes in it,” she said. “But how many times have I been wrong about things like this?”
He couldn’t think of any. There had to be at least one time, he thought. But no instance came to mind.