Chase the ace
After almost a year, winner walks away a millionaire.
The announcer was holding the ticket above his head, smiling out at the packed rink on Saturday night. He read the numbers, sending thousands of people riffling through their tickets. The winner had 25 minutes to come forward. In the meantime, it was worth reminding everyone about the missing white purse.
“The person is very concerned. She’s been looking for it all afternoon,” the announcer said.
The woman had set the purse down for just a minute, to rest on a bar stool near the tables where volunteers were selling beer. She was drinking and talking to a couple in the visitors’ end of the arena. She looked down and the purse was gone.
The woman, who gave her name as Paulette, was in Inverness from Sydney, N.S., two hours away. Her cellphone was in that creamcoloured purse, along with all her money and, crucially, her tickets.
Inverness was not a good place to be looking for a purse. People were streaming in from hundreds of kilometres away to play Chase the Ace, a tweaked version of the humble 50/50 fundraising draw that had spiralled into a milliondollar jackpot.
Each Saturday, the winner of the draw got a chance to win the jackpot by pulling the ace of spades from a deck of cards. But for 47 weeks, the ace did not turn up, so the jackpot got bigger and people around Cape Breton started to notice.
Now, five cards were left in the deck.
But enough was enough for the beleaguered village that has been playing host to much of the Maritimes all summer.
So organizers decided that on Saturday, they were going to keep drawing tickets until someone pulled the ace.
There was a line snaking around the old barn-sized rink, past the barbecue pits and buses, around the adjacent racetrack, all the way to the horse barns.
Inside the arena, a fiddle band was playing on the stage set up at centre ice. Packs of people in lawn chairs were parked on the concrete floor. People were crammed onto the bleachers, and along the wooden staircases at the back.
By 5 p.m., there was nowhere to move, except one thin lane through the crowd, just wide enough to let a single-file line wiggle their way to the bar at the far end.
But that line ground to a stop every time someone ran into an acquaintance.
Ken Ferguson, from outside Dartmouth, N.S., saw a woman he hadn’t seen since her wedding 20 years ago and couldn’t remember her name. Millie MacIssac stopped when she saw Jean Pottie, and they started dancing. The people behind them just waited, unperturbed.
“I can’t get five steps without seeing someone I know,” Annie Beaton said, standing near the stage.
Once the arena hit capacity, people filled the overflow areas at the racetrack, the Legion, a local high school and a nearby concert grounds.
Others huddled in their cars, watching the CBC coverage and waiting for the numbers to be announced.
In total, there were more than 22,000 around this town of 1,500, organizers said.
Since it began, half of the ticket proceeds have gone to the local Royal Canadian Legion branch and a centre for people with developmental disabilities. Instead of the other half going to the winner, the ticket holder only gets 20 per cent of the day’s take — more than $350,000 on Saturday. The rest goes into the jackpot, and the winner gets a chance to pull the ace.
To make sure Chase the Ace ended Saturday, the first winner would get the regular 20-per-cent cut. But if there had to be a second or third draw, those winners would get a $25,000 consolation prize if they didn’t pull the ace.
After ticket sales stopped around 5 p.m., volunteers carted garbage bins filled with the multi-coloured tickets onto the stage and dumped them into a wooden box. A blindfolded man from the Nova Scotia alcohol and gaming department leaned into the bin and pulled a pink ticket.
It was Colleen Walsh’s ticket. She’s an Avon makeup sales rep in town from Cole Harbour, N.S., on a trip that was somewhere in between business and pleasure. She was standing outside, trying to recruit a stylish-looking woman to join her Avon team. The woman was wearing an ace of spades ring, so Colleen Walsh kissed it for luck. Not long after that kiss, she was up on the stage in her boa and sequined hat.
The five cards were laid out on the table. She picked the three of diamonds. The crowd sighed, more out of relief than pity for the woman who had just won 20 per cent, or $356,000.
The blindfolded man picked another ticket and the requisite 25-minute grace period began again.
The second winner was not in the rink and would need to be escorted over by the Mounties. So there was a push to get out the door to the smokers’ pit and push to get back in when the winner showed up — as if the rink was exhaling and inhaling.
But again, the ace did not turn up. The winner walked offstage with a $25,000 cheque.
Donelda MacAskill knew what she was doing. It was not her first chase, she’d been coming since August. And she knew about the devastating traffic as thousands of cars inched out of Inverness. She was waiting at her car on the side of the road, ready to make a dash for home once it was over. She found a dime in the car and thought of her late mother, as she does whenever she finds a dime.
“I just felt my mother was with me all day,” said MacAskill, owner of Donelda’s Puffin Boat Tours in Englishtown on the opposite side of Cape Breton.
After they called Donelda’s number, she was on stage in her purple fleece vest, shaking. She picked the card in the middle of the table, looked at it, and let it drop. She stumbled back, hands on her mouth. From the stage, despite all the screaming, she managed to call her husband John — at home recovering from cancer treatment — to tell him they had just won $1.7 million.
The rink was empty in minutes and a troop of volunteers started sweeping up beer cans and ripped tickets from the sticky floor. Paulette waited as people filed out, talking with security to see if anyone had turned in the cream-coloured purse. She needed her phone to talk to her kids.
She wandered to the back of room and leaned up against the baby blue brick, staring at the floor.
“I can’t breathe,” she said. “I can’t breathe.”
An arm’s length away, Donelda MacAskill was tucked in a doorway beside her son, talking on her phone and crying.
After almost a year of Chase the Ace in Inverness, it was over. All that was left was a woman with no purse standing next to a new millionaire, each unaware of the other.