What was lost can sometimes never be found again, as belongings have a habit of tumbling into the fiery chasm from whence they came. Or you know, they just go missing. One woman who thought her collection of jewelry worth thousands of dollars would never return three years after she’d lost it. But she didn’t realize there was a team of honest cleaners out there.

The woman and her husband moved from Florida to New York a few years back, with the loss of an assortment of class and wedding rings, watches, pearls, earrings and a bracelet, many encrusted with precious stones, weighing heavily on the couple, reports the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

The jewelry had been in a small purse that somehow went missing, never to be found despite multiple searches by friends and family after the couple sold their furnished home and moved north.

“It was very frustrating,” the woman said. “I just knew it was there some place in the house, but I didn’t know where.”

Enter the very thorough owner of a cleaning company who was on the job with a crew, cleaning the house to prepare it for its new owners. One her workers found the purse while cleaning behind a couch, where it may have fallen to the floor from between the couch’s cushions.

Instead of calling the real estate agent, the owner went on the hunt herself. Through county property records, she figured out who had owned the house before, and saw that the woman’s initials matched those on one of the class rings. From there it was a bit of detective work in school alumni pages before she found the right person and got a phone number.

Again, this is thousands of dollars worth of jewelry that could’ve just slipped into pockets, never to be heard of again. But instead, the workers went above and beyond to return it to its rightful owner.

“I was totally overwhelmed when she called me, because of the honesty of that person, and that she would get on the phone and call me and tell me they had found it,” the owner said.

The owner of the cleaning crew insured the package for between $20,000 and $50,000 and mailed it up to New York, where the woman found it had arrived safely with each and every piece there.

“She is truly an angel,” the woman said of the cleaning company’s owner. “She truly is.”

New Smyrna Beach cleaning business returns jewelry missing for years to owner [The Daytona Beach News-Journal]

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