Moriarty a mystery no more

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Mystery solved!

Frank Moriarty has been found, and Michelle Chabot has spoken to him over the telephone.

The connection came as a result of a couple of months of back-and-forth clues and sleuthing by Chabot and her family in Quebec and Register readers here in Kings County.

Chabot’s boyfriend, Jacques Bergeron, discovered a message in a bottle on a beach near Sept Isles, Quebec, earlier this fall. The bottle had been dropped off a ferry two years before by Moriarty, who gave his address as Randy Lane, Kentville. When the Quebec family attempted to reach him, their card came back and his phone number was answered by a new user.

Chabot called The Kings County Register, thinking readers may know Moriarty. When the first story came out in early November, a dozen emails and phone calls came in response.

It turns out Moriarty was the long-time Kings County aquatics instructor at the Waterville pool, and he’d moved - apparently back to Newfoundland - last year. Friends, people who knew the family, others who had done work at Moriarty’s home and even his county boss called, all with scraps of information.

To no avail. Phone numbers in Newfoundland didn’t work, Chabot reported in the weeks afterward, and there had been no response to a card she’d sent off to Moriarty’s sister in Clarkes Beach, NF.

A second Register story in early December brought out some more details from readers.

“I found him!” Chabot reported just before Christmas. “We succeed!”

She says she called his phone number and he answered.

“He was working in a swimming pool in Newfoundland.”

Moriarty, it seems, had heard about the search for him, and did call Chabot. She saw a Newfoundland number on her phone and called right back.

“He said that someone saw the story in the paper, and was just very surprised.”

Chabot and Moriarty didn’t chat long - he was working “and it’s important to be watching when you are the lifeguard,” Chabot says.

As she spoke to him, funnily enough, Bergeron came home.

“I was waving my arms and saying, ‘This is him!’

“He asked me for an address and will send me a Christmas card and a picture, and I will send him a T-shirt from here. The mystery is solved, and we have a chance to meet someday.”

Chabot says Moriarty plans to return in the new year to the Valley, and he will start work again with the county swimming program.

“Thank you to all the people who phoned or wrote - all the investigators - to give to Sara some information.”