Roger Nickolet could hardly believe his eyes when he saw $100 and $50 bills floating down from the sky.
He and his wife Gladys were driving to their grandson's baseball game on Massey Drive tailing a black pickup truck late Tuesday afternoon of last week when the truck hit a bag containing the day's cash receipts of T&S Communications.
Roger, having just come from an optometrist's office after having drops put in his eyes which blurred his vision, saw a crisp $100 bill fly over the car's hood and thought he was imagining it.
"We saw all this money blowing in the wind, and you could see the pink and the colours of the money," Gladys said. "It was something else. It's hard to even believe it. Everything happened so fast and everything came together like it should."
Several other drivers stopped to help the Nickolets collect the cash, almost all of it $50s and $100s. Gladys was putting the bills back in the black bank deposit bag and two or three other motorists willingly gave her all they collected.
"They saw me with a large amount in my hand and I kind of put my hand out and they handed it to me, and that was good of them to do that because they could have just jumped in their cars with it," said Gladys. "When you see the bag there and you know it's a deposit, we could never just put it in our pockets."
T&S owner Karen Toombs had just closed her Nicholson Street office and was heading to the bank at Pine Centre Mall. She forgot she'd placed the bag of bills on top of her car while saying goodbye to her daughter from Quesnel. When she got to the bank and asked her other daughter for the bag and it wasn't in the car, they drove back to the store, noticing a commotion of drivers on the other side of the boulevard as they headed back up the road.
"I saw all these cars and all these people and thought, 'Oh oh, there must have been an accident,' not thinking it might be my deposit," said Toombs. "I went back to the office with a fine-tooth comb and couldn't find it and then it dawned on me that we had to go back to where I'd seen all those people milling about."
By the time they'd realized that mad dash was a money grab, the Nickolets and the other drivers had left the scene.
The bag had no identification other than the name Toombs and some of the names of her rental home business customers, which were written on two receipt books.
Toombs lives west of the city in the Chilako area and the only Toombs listed in the Prince George phone directory is her uncle John. The Nickolets phoned that number and left a message on the answering machine, as did Karen, thinking somebody might contact her uncle to turn the money in. He relayed the Nickolets' message to Karen and she phoned them.
They dropped by the next day to return the cash.
"We were thrilled we were able to get the majority of the money," said Gladys.
Just one $100 bill from the $1,725 total was unaccounted for, until Toombs's daughter found it later that Tuesday evening on the other side of the road.
"We're still marvelling about the fact we got the whole amount back, that's a miracle in itself," said Toombs.
Toombs offered the Nickolets a reward, which they declined.
When Toombs insisted they accept a token for their honesty, they suggested their granddaughter Jayan in Mackenzie would like to go to Ness Lake Bible Camp this summer and Toombs readily agreed.
As it turned out, her parents live in Mackenzie and know the Nickolets' daughter-in-law Angie as customers of hers at the Mackenzie Tim Hortons. Toombs phoned Angie to explain the reason they would be receiving a cheque in the mail and Toombs's parents went for coffee that day.
"The girl came out from the back and handed them their coffee and said, "I've got a funny story to tell you, it's so amazing,' and my folks said, 'You've got a story? Well we have a story too,' and they both started telling the same story at the same time," Toombs laughed.
The Nickolets have a history of instigating acts of honesty. A few years ago they found a wallet at the mall stuffed with cash, which was lost when a toddler in a shopping cart reached into his mother's purse and tossed the wallet to the ground. The woman had just cashed her paycheque and was about to start her Christmas shopping. The Nickolets met the woman's mother-in-law and she told them they saved the family's Christmas.
