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When Jade stayed silent, Brogan cleared her throat. “Jade had a gut feeling about that corner of the backyard.”
Instead of questioning that, Brent cocked a brow and studied Jade. “If that’s the best you can do—”
“Does it really matter who decided we should dig in a certain spot?” Lucien reasoned. “In the grand scheme of things, the important thing is we found something and it didn’t take all day.”
“But this is a World War II medical kit,” Brent pointed out. “It shouldn’t be there.”
“Maybe it belonged to the guy in the blanket box,” Brogan suggested. “You know, the dead murder victim.”
Brent shifted his feet. “Could be. Any reason we’re standing around waiting to open this thing up.”
Lucien chuckled. “We’re waiting for you to give us the go-ahead.”
Brent brought out a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket and sat down on the sofa. He reached toward the box, flipped up the rusted metal latches, and gingerly lifted the lid. “Here we go.”
Brogan didn’t realize how nervous she was until the metal lid of the box creaked open. She saw a mess of papers that reeked with an odor of mold and mildew. “Why would Vera Lockhart keep all this stuff?”
“Take a look,” Brent replied, shuffling through a pile of old driver’s licenses, some plastic, some in paper form but laminated. There were official-looking social security cards with different names and another ten military IDs. He picked up a laminated driver's license from Kansas that expired in 1972 and studied the name and address. “Joseph Ellington, born 1940, lived on a rural road outside Smolen, Kansas.”
Kelly used her phone to search for the town. After a few seconds, she announced, “That’s located near Salinas, off I-35. But it’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
Beckett scratched the side of his jaw. “What is Ellington’s driver’s license doing buried in Vera’s yard, some seventeen hundred miles away from Kansas.”
“Maybe because he was stuffed into Vera’s bedroom box,” Jade offered. “How many different IDs are there?”
“I’ve counted twenty,” Brent groused. “It seems Vera was a scam artist in her earlier years.”
“Or a serial killer,” Brogan tossed back.
“Or both,” Brent tossed back. “One of the IDs in here is a driver’s license issued in 1964 to a seventeen-year-old Talia Winterborne from Orono, Maine.”
Kelly looked up the name using her phone again. “That tracks back to a timber heiress named Talia Winterborne. This is weird. Talia went missing back in 1968 when she was twenty-one. Daughter of Isaac Winterborne, a lumber baron, Talia was in her last year at university. On the evening of December 6th, 1968, a Saturday, she met up with friends at a Bar Harbor restaurant an hour and a half away from her condo in Orono. After dinner, the friends said they walked Talia to her car. They watched her drive away, heading north toward Orono and the University of Maine. But she never arrived back home, which was two blocks from campus. Talia was never seen again after that. The article says that Talia was the only heir to her father’s fortune. She was due to go to work for his company after graduating. Authorities at the time believed her disappearance involved a kidnapping. But her disappearance remains unsolved.”
Brent scowled at Kelly. “A kidnapping? Like for ransom?”
“That’s what the story says. But it also says there was never a ransom demand.”
He held up Winterborne’s driver’s license. “Are we talking about the same girl?”
Kelly handed her phone to Brent so he could see Talia’s photograph. “That’s dated the year Talia went missing from her student ID. The photo on the operator’s license is four years younger. But it looks like the same woman.”
“Could Vera have been involved in kidnapping Talia?” Brogan prompted. “If so, it might explain Vera’s mysterious past. She would’ve needed to go on the run after such an undertaking.”
Brent stared at Talia’s picture from the article, comparing the pretty college student’s face to her driver’s license photo. “At this point, I’m not ruling anything out.” He let out a discernible sigh. “Nothing about Vera screamed Maine accent, though. That’s hard to hide. But then why would Vera have a missing woman’s ID in her possession? And where is Talia Winterborne now?”
“One of those IDs has to belong to the real Vera Lockhart,” Lucien charged.
“Not necessarily,” Brent remarked. “That would make for an easy solution. But eleven of these IDs belong to females. So there’s that in our favor. And there are at least eleven different birth certificates here.” He handed the phone back to Kelly and gave the IDs to Lucien. “Just look at those pictures. I think these are more likely Vera’s victims. In my opinion, none of the photographs resemble the Vera I knew.”
Lucien perused through the IDs, then handed them off to Brogan, who went through them slowly, staring at the women’s faces, looking for anything that might indicate a young Vera Lockhart. “You’re right. The noses are all wrong. But noses can be fixed. Just ask any plastic surgeon.”
Beckett, Kelly, and Jade took their turns, muttering among themselves.
Jade pulled one in particular from the stack. “This Canadian picture is the closest yet. The eyes match. See for yourself.”
Brogan studied the dark-haired female, the shape of her mouth and forehead. The woman depicted on the operator’s license couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. “Okay, definitely similar. The name on it says Katharine Pellico from Saint-Georges, Quebec.”
“That town’s close to Maine,” Beckett offered, checking his phone for details. “Saint-Georges is four and half hours from Bar Harbor. That’s an afternoon’s drive.”
