In the quiet rural outskirts of Brookfield, Nova Scotia, where gravel roads wind between pine forests and most homes sit hundreds of yards apart, one local resident says she now sleeps with her lights on, after police made a chilling request that has rocked the tight-knit community.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of backlash, lives less than half a kilometer from the Sullivan family farmhouse where six-year-old Lilly and eight-year-old Jack were last seen on the evening of November 12. What she told friends in confidence is now spreading like wildfire through the province: RCMP officers showed up at her door in the middle of the night and demanded every minute of trail-camera footage from the entire week leading up to the children’s disappearance.

“They didn’t just want the day they went missing,” she reportedly whispered to a neighbor over coffee the next morning. “They wanted the whole card, days and days of it. They said ‘anything out of the ordinary, even if it seems small.’ I’ve never seen police look that serious.”

The neighbor’s property backs onto a wooded trail that search teams have scoured for nearly two weeks. Her two Browning trail cameras, mounted to catch coyotes and deer near her chicken coop, point directly toward a seldom-used logging road that skirts the edge of the Sullivan land. According to people familiar with the cameras’ field of view, one lens captures almost the entire back boundary of Lilly and Jack’s yard, including the tree line where the children loved to build forts.

What could the police be looking for that far back in time?

Sources close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the request is highly unusual this early in a missing-children case. Typically, investigators zero in on the 24–48 hours before a child vanishes. Asking for seven full days of remote footage suggests authorities either suspect the siblings were being watched, or, more disturbingly, that someone may have been on the property long before the official “last seen” timeline.

The neighbor, a 58-year-old retired nurse everyone knows simply as “Miss Janet,” is said to be shaken. Friends describe her pacing her kitchen at night, replaying the encounter in her mind. One friend recounted her saying: “I always thought those cameras were just for animals. Now I keep thinking, what if something, or someone, walked right past them nights before anyone noticed the kids were gone?”

Residents report that police took the SD cards on the spot, replaced them with new ones, and instructed her not to discuss the visit with anyone, including other officers who might come by later. Yet in a small community where everyone knows everyone’s truck by the sound of its muffler, word travels fast. By the weekend, half the county seemed to be asking the same question: What did those cameras catch?

Some locals speculate the footage might show a vehicle that didn’t belong, someone lingering too long at the edge of the woods, or, in the darkest rumors, signs that Lilly and Jack were not taken suddenly, but lured over several days. One father who coaches Jack’s hockey team was overheard at the rink saying, “If someone was scoping that house for a week, those kids never had a chance.”

Others point out that trail cameras often pick up innocuous things: delivery drivers taking shortcuts, teenagers sneaking beers, even bears. But the fact that the RCMP Major Crime Unit made a 2 a.m. visit and left with every frame has fueled a sense of dread that whatever is on those cards is far from innocuous.

As of Sunday night, volunteers who have been searching fields and abandoned barns for twelve straight days say police have suddenly shifted resources toward dense bush behind the Sullivan property, exactly the area covered by Miss Janet’s cameras. Cadaver dogs that had been working miles away were brought back to that grid. A helicopter with forward-looking infrared was spotted circling the same ridge at dusk.

Meanwhile, the children’s parents, Melissa and Ryan Sullivan, have made no public comment since their emotional plea for information last week. Friends say the couple is “beyond devastated” and clinging to hope, but the new focus on pre-disappearance activity has left them reeling.

One close family friend, fighting back tears outside the command post, told reporters: “If someone was watching our babies for days… I can’t even say it. Just pray those cameras show us who it was before it’s too late.”

Back on the quiet road where porch lights now burn all night, Miss Janet reportedly sits by her window, staring at the empty spot where her trail cam used to hang. She told one visitor she keeps replaying the officer’s parting words: “You might have recorded the only witness we’ve got.”

Twelve days in, with snow in the forecast and temperatures set to plummet, the people of Brookfield are holding their breath. Somewhere on a police laptop, thousands of hours of silent forest footage are being watched frame by frame.

And somewhere in those dark, grainy images, two little faces might have looked up at the wrong moment, straight into a lens they never knew was there.

The question everyone is afraid to ask out loud: What exactly did Miss Janet’s camera see in the days when Lilly and Jack Sullivan were still laughing in their backyard, unaware that someone, or something, may already have been watching?