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“What happened to Jana, Hallie, and Mathias?” asked Josie.
“All of them had to move out of the foster home. Hallie and Mathias were adults by then. They both had jobs since they were old enough to get them, so they scraped up some money and rented a house. They got approval for Jana to stay with them until she aged out of the foster care system. They took care of her. Raised her like she was their child. I think I told you it was Hallie who contacted me.”
Josie said, “She stayed in Bly all this time?”
Trinity nodded. “Hallie said she couldn’t leave after Jana’s death. It didn’t feel right. Jana was like a daughter to her, and she couldn’t leave the place where Jana had died without some kind of resolution. Hallie never believed that Jana’s death was an accident, but she’s never been able to prove otherwise. When my show launched last year, she immediately started contacting the team. She thought with my local connection to Central Pennsylvania, that I would want to look at the case. Unfortunately, I didn’t see her messages until recently. Once I did, I agreed to look into it.”
“How recently?” Josie asked. It still nagged at her that the very weekend that Sharon Eddy turned up murdered, her body bearing a clear sign from the killer that he was trying to get Dr. Feist’s attention, Trinity was in town to look into a case from the county where Dr. Feist used to live and work. There had to be some catalyst, something that had set Sharon Eddy’s murder into motion. Josie just couldn’t figure out what it was—yet.
“Last year. Late summer, early fall,” Trinity tapped the folder. “It’s taken me some time to put all this together.”
A loud bang sounded from the backyard. Trout’s head snapped up. He looked around the kitchen and, seeing no immediate threat, went back to sleep. Trinity sprang up from her chair and peeked outside. “It’s okay,” she said. “Nothing’s on fire. Yet.”
Josie went back to studying the map. Two other locations had been circled and marked. The first was what looked like a gas station. Trinity’s notation read:last seen. Then, what appeared to be a few miles from there was another mark, this one a wooded area sandwiched between a two-lane road and a lake. The note read:body found.
Plopping back into her chair, Trinity tapped a finger over the gas station. “Jana Melburn did not have her own vehicle. She hoofed it everywhere or got rides from people. She was attending community college at the time so all her money went toward tuition and books. Her foster brother, Mathias, had a pickup truck. Old, beat-up. No GPS. He often gave her a ride when she needed one—if he could. On this night, May 15, 2013, around ninep.m., Jana Melburn had left her home and walked to this gas station where she bought a Coke and a pack of cigarettes. While she was inside, Mathias pulled up and started pumping gas. He had come from work and was heading home from there. Jana went outside. They talked for about five minutes. Mathias pulled away. Jana walked off.”
“She wasn’t going back home?” asked Josie.
“Here is where it gets really interesting. Mathias told the police and Hallie that Jana said she was meeting someone, but she wouldn’t say who. When he pressed her, she said something cryptic like she was trying to find out where they came from.”
“What does that mean?” asked Josie.
“Mathias said he assumed she was talking about birth parents. Remember, he, Hallie and Jana were all foster kids. Anyway, he told the police that he found it suspicious that she’d be meeting someone to talk about her birth parents at nine o’clock at night and even more suspicious that she wouldn’t give him any more information. He told her she should drop it and just come home with him since it was late and dark, but she refused. She was an adult, he said, and so he let her go. He says he did try to follow her in his truck but lost her when he got stuck at a traffic light and she turned onto a side street.”
“So he just went home?”
Trinity shrugged. “He says he drove around looking for her for a while—he wasn’t sure how long, maybe an hour—and when he didn’t find her, he gave up and went home. He tried calling her, but she didn’t answer. It went right to voicemail. The police believe she turned her phone off after she left the gas station because they weren’t able to ping it or use it to see where she had been the night she went missing. Then he thought maybe he had overreacted. He’d been acting as her father for ten years and now she was nineteen. He thought maybe it was time to give her some space. So he went home to bed. The next morning, he and Hallie realized that Jana hadn’t come home. They called the doctor’s office where Jana worked and found out Jana had not shown up for her shift that morning.”
It sounded eerily similar to the Sharon Eddy case.
Trinity continued, “Both Hallie and Mathias tried calling Jana’s phone, but still no answer. They contacted the police. Because Jana was nineteen, they wouldn’t take a missing person’s report until she’d been missing for twenty-four hours. Hallie and Mathias searched for her. They called everyone Jana knew but no one had seen or heard from her. They looked everywhere they could think to look but couldn’t find her.”
“Mathias, Jana, and Hallie all still lived together at this point?” asked Josie.
“Yes,” said Trinity.
“Did Hallie see him that night when he came home?”
“Unfortunately, no. She was working at the textile manufacturing company she was employed by at the time. Her shift ended around midnight. When she got home, both Mathias’s and Jana’s bedroom doors were closed. She assumed they were both sleeping.”
“Which means Mathias had no alibi. Does Hallie believe Mathias’s claims about what happened the last time he saw Jana alive?”
“Yes,” Trinity said. “She says that Mathias wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Did Hallie have any idea who Jana was meeting with?”
“No. Hallie says Jana never said a word about trying to find her birth parents. She was shocked to hear it, actually. It had never come up among them before.”
“Hallie was never suspicious of Mathias at all?”
“Hallie told me that for all intents and purposes, Mathias was Jana’s father. Hallie says she and Mathias both took their roles as stand-in parents to Jana very seriously. Therefore, Mathias would never hurt Jana. Hallie says he would never hurt anyone.”
“But everyone else in Bly thought he would and had.”
Trinity nodded. “Mathias Tobin had an unfortunate history of accusations against him going back to high school.”
SIXTEEN
