In the dense, whispering woods of Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, where autumn leaves now blanket the ground like a shroud, the mystery of two missing children has gripped Canada like a fever dream. Lilly Sullivan, 6, with her shoulder-length light brown hair and penchant for pink everything, and her little brother Jack, 4, with his tousled blondish curls and dinosaur-stomping boots, vanished without a trace from their rural home on Gairloch Road in Lansdowne Station on May 2, 2025. It was a Thursday morning, the kind that starts with birdsong and ends in nightmares. Their mother, Malehya Brooks-Murray, dialed 911 at 10:01 a.m., her voice cracking over the line: “My babies are gone.”

Six months later, as winter’s chill creeps in, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are doubling down on interviews with those closest to the siblings—parents, stepparents, grandparents, neighbors, even estranged relatives across the border in New Brunswick. Over 860 tips have flooded in, 8,000 hours of video scrubbed, and forensic teams have combed 40 kilometers of rugged terrain. Yet Lilly and Jack remain ghosts in the mist. No bodies. No sightings. Just echoes of what might have been: Lilly’s cough that kept her home from school that day, Jack’s tiny hand clutching a toy truck left abandoned on the porch.

The official line from the RCMP has held steady: the children likely wandered off into the surrounding wilderness, a thicket of steep banks, briars, and ancient Mi’kmaq-rooted forests that swallow sound and light whole. No evidence of abduction, they insist. But whispers in the tight-knit Sipekne’katik First Nation community—where the Sullivans are beloved members—paint a picture far murkier. Why were the kids kept home? Why no signs of forced entry or struggle? And now, with cadaver dogs turning up empty in September sweeps and a $150,000 provincial reward dangling like forbidden fruit, the interviews feel less like routine and more like a last-ditch unraveling of alibis.

Rewind to that fateful dawn. Brooks-Murray, 28, a soft-spoken graphic designer raising her kids with partner Daniel Martell, 32, in a modest bungalow hemmed by evergreens, woke to an empty house. The back door hung ajar, a sippy cup overturned on the kitchen floor. Martell, a millworker with callused hands and a quiet demeanor, bolted into the woods first, flashlight slicing the fog. He later told investigators he heard a child’s scream—high-pitched, desperate—mimicking Jack’s wail or Lilly’s yelp. But then came the thwop-thwop of an RCMP chopper overhead, drowning it out. “I froze,” he recounted in a redacted affidavit. “Thought it was them. But the noise… it just swallowed everything.”

By noon, the machine roared to life. Over 160 volunteers—neighbors in flannel, off-duty firefighters, Mi’kmaq elders chanting prayers—fanned out across 8.5 square kilometers. Drones buzzed like angry hornets, K9 units sniffed boot prints into oblivion, divers dragged the Middle River’s murky bottom. Premier Tim Houston’s voice boomed from podiums: “We’re praying for our little ones.” The nation tuned in, hearts twisting as posters of Lilly in her pink sweater and Jack in his roaring dinos plastered Tim Hortons windows from Halifax to Vancouver.

But hope curdled fast. By May 7, just five days in, the grid search scaled back. Staff Sgt. Curtis MacKinnon, his face etched with the gravel of sleepless nights, admitted the odds: “The likelihood they’re alive is very low.” No claw marks on trees, no discarded pink boots snagged in roots. Underwater teams scoured ponds on May 8 and 9—nothing. Tips poured in—180 by mid-May, from truckers spotting “ghost kids” on highways to psychics dreaming of shallow graves—but most fizzled into dead ends.

Enter the family fractures, the fault lines RCMP are now probing with surgical precision. Brooks-Murray and Martell, who met through mutual friends in the community center craft nights, describe a blended bliss: bedtime stories by the woodstove, Sunday drives to Truro for ice cream. But court docs, unsealed in August at the behest of CBC and The Globe and Mail, reveal a darker undercurrent. The night of May 2, at 12:45 a.m., Brooks-Murray called cops in a panic, convinced the kids’ biological father, Cody Sullivan, 30, had snatched them. Officers rapped on his door in Moncton at 2:50 a.m.; he swore on his mother’s grave he hadn’t seen Lilly or Jack in three years, not since a bitter custody spat soured into radio silence.

Cody, a welder with a rap sheet for DUIs but no violence, lives in a tidy trailer with his mom, Belynda Gray, the kids’ doting grandma who chain-smokes on her stoop, eyes red-rimmed. “They’re my heart,” she told reporters in October, voice like cracked porcelain. “If I knew… God, if I knew.” Yet RCMP scrutiny landed heavy: polygraphs volunteered by Martell (he passed, sweating bullets), phone pings placing Brooks-Murray at a late-night Tim’s run hours before the 911, even Martell’s “roughhousing” stories from family barbecues dissected for hidden barbs. Redacted files hint at no physical discipline in the home, but blacked-out lines scream of relational storms—arguments over money, Martell’s long shifts, Brooks-Murray’s whispers of feeling “trapped in the trees.”

The interviews ramped up last week, November 18, as a ragtag crew from Ontario’s Please Bring Me Home—40 souls led by co-founder Nick Oldrieve—trudged a five-kilometer loop along the Middle River banks, opposite the Sullivan home. They unearthed “items of interest”: a frayed pink ribbon, child-sized, snagged on barbed wire; a muddy dinosaur boot print, too fresh for May; a child’s drawing of two stick figures under a rainbow, washed up on the shore. Oldrieve, a grizzled ex-cop with tattoos mapping his own losses, choked up at the Union Centre hall briefing: “Winter’s coming. We felt their anxiety like a gut punch. This is last-ditch before the snow buries secrets.”

RCMP Northeast Nova Major Crime Unit swarmed in, hauling in a fresh round of sit-downs. Martell, chain-smoking Camels on his porch, fielded questions for three hours: “Did the kids ever mention running away? Fights with friends?” Brooks-Murray, hollow-eyed at the local Tim’s, relived the scream that wasn’t: “Jack hated the dark woods. Lilly clung to me like glue.” Cody Sullivan drove up from Moncton, fists clenched on the wheel, grilled on old grudges: “I sent birthday cards. They never came.” Even Gray, the grandma, sat for a marathon Q&A, her voice fraying: “I brace for the worst now. But a part of me… it screams they’re out there.”

No arrests. No breakthroughs. Just the grind: 35 formal interviews logged, forensics on the “items” pending, cadaver dogs Narc and Kitt—heroes with noses like radar—covering 40 kilometers in September and finding zilch. Insp. Luke Rettie, handler for Narc, a chocolate Lab with a hero’s limp, told the press: “We hit the high-prob spots—the property, the pipeline trails, that pink blanket site from June. Empty. But dogs don’t lie.”

The Sullivan home stands sentinel, windows dark, a faded “Bring Us Home” sign curling in the rain. Brooks-Murray and Martell moved to a Truro apartment, baby sister in tow, haunted by sippy-cup ghosts. The community, once a quilt of potlucks and powwows, frays at the edges—whispers of curses, online sleuths spinning abduction yarns, Mi’kmaq elders burning sage at dawn.

As November 25 dawns gray and biting, the reward swells, tips trickle (one from a Maine trucker claiming “blond kid ghosts” on I-95), and RCMP’s MacKinnon pleads: “One detail. That’s all it takes.” Lilly would be chasing snowflakes now, Jack stomping puddles in those blue boots. Instead, their absence carves hollows in hearts across the Maritimes.

In Lansdowne Station, where the river murmurs secrets to the pines, hope flickers like a candle in wind. The interviews grind on, peeling back lives like onion skins. But for the Sullivans—fractured, faithful, forever waiting—the woods hold their breath. And somewhere, in the rustle of leaves or the cry of a loon, two small voices might still be calling home.