Rings found in game hers, widow says
Tourists find jewelry worth $17,000 in box
Orlanda Drebit’s niece called her on Friday morning with a question: “Did you have a MindTrap game?” Drebit was still in bed.
“What?” she said. “A MindTrap game? No. I don’t have a MindTrap game.”
But she did have a MindTrap game, until recently. It took seeing a photo of the 1990s board game for Drebit to realize, yes, that box was one of the games she cleared out of the hutch in her bedroom and donated to a Charlottetown thrift store a month or two ago.
Well, her niece said, there’s a story in National Post about some Australians who bought that board game during a holiday in Prince Edward Island around Labour Day.
The family, drinking wine and playing the game in a rented cottage in Charlottetown, found seven rings worth at least $17,000 hidden in the bottom of the box.
“How could I be so stupid?” Drebit thought to herself when she saw the photos of the box and the rings online. She was certain they were her rings, most of them gifts from her husband, Donald, who died in a car crash nine years ago.
She hadn’t seen the rings since the summer of 2015, when she was rushing away to spend the weekend at the Cavendish Beach Festival with a friend.
Whenever she left home, she made sure she tucked those seven rings some place a burglar would never look: a housecoat pocket, a mitten shoved in a tote bag in a closet.
But that time, she forgot her hiding place. “I’m in menopause,” she said, “and I’m getting forgetful.”
Months later, she decided they were gone. Her theory was she tucked them in a towel and dropped them on the beach in Cavendish.
She filed a police report and her insurance paid for the rings.
It took time, but she started to accept it, telling herself the rings were just things. But they were special things. There was the engagement ring Donald gave her nearly 30 years ago, when he came home all of a sudden insistent on taking a walk along the water- front in Charlottetown, despite Drebit being in the middle of some housework. And there was a wedding band he gave her on their wedding day in 1991. And an opal ring his mother gave Drebit to wear as her something-borrowed.
Donald bought her jewelry for her birthday, or on Christmas — earrings, or a necklace or a ring. He said they held a “high rate of return,” since Drebit loved each piece so much, and wore them every day to work, a ring on each finger.
“I have a big personality. And the jewelry matches that,” she said. “He took a lot of care to choose things that were different.”
“He was a wonderful, wonderful man,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “He was just the other half of me.”
On Friday, when she saw the rings after believing for two and a half years she never would, she realized what happened. She couldn’t remember putting the rings in the MindTrap box, but she was also certain she did. “I know it all sounds really weird,” she said. “I don’t remember doing it, no. Otherwise I would have found them two and a half years ago.”
Drebit started making phone calls. She called the RCMP detachment in Queens County. She called her insurance company. She needed to get a message to Chris Lightfoot, the Australian living in Toronto who had bought the MindTrap game on a visit to Charlottetown with his family. “Please,” she wanted to say to him, “tell me you haven’t sold them.”
By the afternoon, Drebit heard back from Lightfoot, who was at work building cellphone towers around Toronto. And as of Friday night, the two were working out a way to get the rings back to Drebit in P.E.I.
“I’ll never get him back,” Drebit said of her husband. “But getting back my engagement ring would mean a lot.”