A TORONTONIAN AND HIS PARENTS VISITING FROM AUSTRALIA WENT TO P.E.I. AND, WHILE THERE, BOUGHT A SECOND-HAND BOARD GAME AT A VALUE VILLAGE. FOR SOME REASON, THE CARDS JUST DIDN’T FIT IN THE BOX …
IN FALSE BOTTOM Aussie visitors stumble on $17,000 in gems
Chris Lightfoot’s parents were visiting from Australia so he figured he’d take them to Prince Edward Island, because it seemed a better idea than staying in the city on Labour Day weekend.
Lightfoot, a 28-yearold who builds cell towers around Ontario, lives with his girlfriend in Toronto on a two-year visa. “Yeah, just show them around, see a bit of the country we haven’t seen, since we’ve only been here six months,” he said.
During the days, they drove around — harbours, lighthouses, red-sand beaches. At night, they stayed in and cooked. Toward the end of the trip, looking to shake up their quiet evenings, they went to Value Village in Charlottetown — the only Value Village on the island — to look for board games. “We were choosing through them, and it was like, ‘Do we want 1980s Trivial Pursuit? Or Monopoly missing three pieces?’”
Among the old board games was a faded black box, with turquoise edging and painted purple clouds. It was Mindtrap, the Canadianmade game of “lateral thinking” puzzles.
“Yeah, this’ll do,” he said. The game and a couple of puzzles came to $7 for the lot. “The game was worth, like, $2.99.”
After dinner, at their rented cottage in Charlottetown, they sat around drinking wine and playing Mindtrap — reading brainteasers to each other from cards. Lightfoot’s mother tried to put one of the spent cards back in the box, but they wouldn’t fit properly.
“We’re like, ‘How is this not fitting back in?’” he said. “What’s going on? So then we pulled all the cards out.”
They found a piece of cardboard wedged in the bottom — a false bottom. “It had obviously fallen out of place while we were playing with it.” His mom peeled it back. “Look what’s in here,” she said.
“She just pulls out a diamond ring. And we’re like, ‘What?’” Lightfoot said. “She reached back in and pulls out another one. And we’re like, ‘Another one!’ And she just kept pulling out diamond rings.”
“There was, like, seven in there.”
But the diamonds couldn’t be real, they thought. His mom had the eyeglasses she uses for embroidering. They have magnifiers in them. Around the table, with the glasses, they could make out little engravings on the inside of the bands, marking the gold as 14 karat. “I think these are like, legit,” Lightfoot remembered saying.
After that, they went back to the game.
“We just kept on drinking and kept on playing,” he said.
The next day, Lightfoot went back to Value Village. “We mentioned: ‘Hey, we found some jewelry. Here’s a number. If someone comes ... give us a call.”
(Four staff who were working at the Charlottetown Value Village on Tuesday weren’t aware of the discovery.)
Lightfoot and his girlfriend flew back to Toronto. On a day with some spare time, he brought the rings to a jeweller on Victoria Street, in the city’s diamond district. Lightfoot left the rings at the shop and returned in the afternoon after the jeweller had some time to examine them.
“How much did you pay for this board game?” the jeweller asked him.
“I don’t know. Three dollars?”
“You’ve got about $17,000 worth of jewelry here.”
That’s the official valuation for insurance purposes, though. “We’d never be able to sell it for 17 grand,” Lightfoot said. “I want to try to swap it for a car.”
“But realistically,” he said. “If someone from P.E.I. saw the story and ... it’s their Grandma Harriet’s ring or whatever, you can have it.”
SHE JUST KEPT PULLING OUT DIAMOND RINGS.