Court documents quietly unsealed yesterday have detonated like a grenade in the frozen silence of Colchester County.

Two separate neighbours, living on opposite sides of the Sullivan property, told RCMP they were woken in the early hours of November 12 (the very night before Lilly and Jack were reported missing) by the unmistakable sound of a vehicle that “didn’t belong.”

Neither witness thought much of it at the time. Both now say those forgotten minutes may hold the key to everything.

The first witness, a 61-year-old farmer whose bedroom window faces the back of the Sullivan land, swore in an affidavit that at approximately 2:47 a.m. he heard a heavy pickup truck slowly crunching up the gravel logging road that cuts behind the children’s play fort. He told investigators:

“It stopped. Engine kept running, low idle, maybe a diesel. No lights. I figured it was kids parking to drink or smoke. I looked at the clock, rolled over, went back to sleep. Forty, forty-five minutes later I heard it leave, real slow, like it didn’t want to spin tires. Never saw a thing, but I know every truck in this parish and that wasn’t one of ours.”

Forty-three minutes. The exact length of time the engine idled is now circled in red on an RCMP timeline that sources say has been hidden from the public until yesterday’s disclosure.

The second witness, a 29-year-old shift worker who lives on the other side of the Sullivan house, gave an almost identical statement. She was up feeding her newborn at 3:05 a.m. when she heard what she described as “the same damn truck” easing past her driveway, again with no headlights. She told police she opened the curtain and caught a glimpse of a dark pickup turning onto the Sullivan’s private laneway.

“I thought it was Danny (stepfather Daniel Martell) coming home late from a job,” she said. “But then I remembered Melissa told me he was home all evening helping Jack with homework. That’s when it felt weird, but I had a crying baby in my arms. I just closed the curtain.”

She never heard doors slam. Never heard voices. Just the low rumble, the crunch of frost-covered gravel, and then silence.

Investigators now believe the truck may have been on the Sullivan property itself for up to half an hour, possibly directly beside the children’s bedroom windows, while the family slept.

What makes the revelation gut-wrenching is the timeline.

Lilly and Jack were last confirmed alive by their mother at 9:15 p.m. on November 12 when she tucked them in. The next official sighting on the family’s own Ring camera shows Daniel Martell walking the dog at 10:53 p.m. After that, nothing, until Melissa realized at 10:30 p.m. on November 13 (almost exactly 24 hours later) that the children were not in their beds.

For months police maintained the children disappeared sometime during that 24-hour window. Now, sealed RCMP notes suggest investigators have known for weeks that someone may have been inside, or directly outside, the house in the dead of night, hours before anyone realized the kids were gone.

The unsealed documents also contain a single, chilling line from the lead detective’s notebook:

“Vehicle heard 02:47–03:32 hrs may represent initial reconnaissance or removal window. Urgent: cross-reference with Big Mike trail-cam series and Martell polygraph scheduling.”

Residents who have read the leaked pages (passed hand-to-hand in the Tim Hortons lineup this morning) are reeling. One grandmother who used to babysit Lilly burst into tears in the parking lot, saying: “They were taken while we all slept. Right under our noses. That truck sat there purring for forty minutes and nobody got out of bed.”

By late afternoon today, RCMP cruisers were parked at both witnesses’ homes again, this time with audio experts asking them to listen to recordings of various diesel and gas engines in hopes of narrowing the make and model.

Meanwhile, the mood in Brookfield has shifted from desperate hope to cold fury. At the evening candlelight vigil, someone hung a new hand-painted sign on the community mailbox that faces the Sullivan laneway. In dripping red letters it reads:

YOU SAT HERE 40 MINUTES. WE WERE 200 YARDS AWAY. WE HEARD YOU. WE’RE COMING NOW.

As temperatures plunge toward –20 tonight and the first real Arctic front of the winter locks the province in ice, two neighbours who once dismissed a strange sound as “nothing” now lie awake listening for an engine they pray they never hear again.

Because somewhere out there, the driver of that truck knows exactly how long he idled in the darkness.

And he knows the people who heard him are finally telling the world what time the nightmare really began.