Page 84 of Echoes at Driftwood Cottage

“I’m already working on it checking the origins. The bands were engraved with the initials HAE and OAE. And the necklace looks like a handmade, genuine Native piece, a little on the pricey side.”

“Great. What about DNA?”

“All the pieces were swabbed as soon as they took them out of the grave.”

“Even better. Let me know if anything pops.”

“Will do. Are we working late tonight?”

“As late as it takes.” Brent glanced up to see Theo Woodsong standing in the doorway. “What have you got for me?”

Theo grinned. “I’m pretty sure I found the right Atticus Eaton. You know, the guy named on Rowan’s birth certificate. And you won’t believe what else I discovered.”

While Brent’s team made headway, Rowan and Will sat around her dining table discussing the pros and cons of focusing on the commune as it pertained to Hallie.

“How would she have ended up there?” Rowan asked, sipping from a mojito Will had thrown together. “Unless the Celestial Moon broke apart near Half Moon Bay and Hallie washed up on the beach there. After all, Phoebe Jamieson mentions a dozen times or more in her research that the members of the commune routinely hung out on that stretch of beach. I know Gwynn loved it there.”

“The newspaper articles weren’t specific about where the ship went down. Despite my years of attempting to pinpoint the exact location, I found it impossible to narrow it down. Many said that pieces of the boat washed up as far south as Santa Cruz and as far north as Half Moon Bay. Remember when I mentioned Pelican Pointe was the epicenter?”

“Like an earthquake,” Rowan murmured.

“Yeah. Sort of. I reached out to several weather experts to get tidal information for December 20th. The results confirm the storm was so powerful that it could’ve scattered debris in a fifty-mile radius up and down the coastline.”

“Okay, so if that fisherman rescued you near San Gregorio, it’s not that much of a stretch to think Hallie might’ve ended up somewhere near Half Moon Bay. Let’s say a member of the commune happened along after the storm and saw a young girl lying on the beach. They take her back to the farmhouse, where, at some point, Lynette decides to adopt her out to another family. What do you say we dig through everything Phoebe sent us? I mean really dig, separate the Nichols’ personal stuff, and focus on adoption records. There has to be a paper trail, right?”

“You’d think but I doubt phony paperwork will help us locate Hallie.”

“You never know,” Rowan said as she started combing through Phoebe Jamieson’s sometimes confusing files. It was an array of correspondence, invoices, medical records, tax returns, and legal documents that Phoebe had obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

With a mass of papers before them, the two culled out those that didn’t seem relevant and concentrated on the forged adoption papers. Some were difficult to spot. But others stood out from the rest because of sloppy details that raised red flags. During a time period that covered August 1999 through April 2000, they found the same couple listed on eight different birth certificates who had supposedly given up eight babies in one year. According to state records, the couple didn’t exist.

“None of these papers are real,” Rowan declared, sliding them toward Will to inspect.

“There’s no driver’s license or social security number prior to 1999 for that couple,” Will asserted. “Talk about lucking out. It seems no one bothered to check whether these adoptions were legit. Hallie could be here somewhere in the adoptions that happened between January 2000 and April 2000.”

“We should concentrate on ages, four to five and up. We don’t know how long she spent at the commune, but it probably wasn’t for long. Here are two more that fit the timeframe. Different mothers are listed on the birth records. Could she have been adopted out as a five-year-old?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because I’m holding paperwork referring to a Judge Silverton signing off on the adoption of a five-year-old girl named Callie. Callie Shelby.”

Will’s head whipped up from the stack of papers he’d been perusing. “It’s gotta be Hallie. Callie / Hallie. Our next step should be hunting down the court records.”

“I’m not sure that would do any good, Will. Have you noticed what all of these adoptions have in common?”

“No. What?”

“This Judge Silverton sealed all the records. They’re not available to the public. That piece of paper I showed you simply refers to Nichols giving his okay for ‘Callie’ to go into the adoption queue. It’s almost as if they were clearing out the farmhouse of children they’d been housing up to the time of the murders. We could get Phoebe to check out this judge though or go up there ourselves and confront him.”

“My vote is to confront him face to face.”

Rowan let out a sigh after keying the name into a search engine. “Not possible. Judge Silverton died in 2010.”

Will slammed his palms down on the table in frustration. “Every time I get close, this is what happens. I hit another dead end.”

Rowan reached out her hand and laid it on Will’s arm. “It’s not a dead end if we have her name and phony date of birth that we can trace. Once she entered the school system under Callie Shelby, there has to be a paper trail.”

From the information Brent’s team accumulated they had more questions than answers So many that Eastlyn tried to prioritize the list. They sat around the conference table long into the night doing their best to piece together answers to what they’d found so far. Over pizza and spaghetti, the four of them dissected each piece of the puzzle.

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