Benji and the Bakery Break-In

The first thing Miss Miriam noticed was that the back door was unlocked.

She always locked it. She had been locking the back door of her bakery every night for twenty-two years, and she was not the type of woman who forgot things like that, and she stood in her back doorway on a Wednesday morning looking at the unlocked door for a moment before she pushed it open carefully and went in.

The bakery looked as she had left it. All the equipment in its place. The commercial oven cold, as it should be before four-thirty when she started it. The prep table clean. The flour bins closed.

Nothing missing. Nothing disturbed.

But the door had been unlocked.

And there was a dog sitting beside the prep table with his nose pointing at something she couldn’t immediately identify, looking at her with amber eyes.

Miss Miriam was sixty-seven and had seen many things in twenty-two years of running the bakery, and she prided herself on not being rattled.

“What you pointing at?” she said to the dog.

Benji looked at the prep table.

She looked at the prep table.

She had decided, by four forty-five, that she needed the children.

This was not something Miss Miriam said to herself directly — she said to herself that she needed to speak to someone about this situation, and who she thought of when she said that was not an adult, it was Omar Reid and the other two who were always with the dog. She had observed the three of them handling three separate situations in Cliffside and her confidence in them was higher than she was comfortable admitting.

She sent her morning delivery boy to get them, because her morning delivery boy was fifteen and was also Clevie’s neighbour, and at five-thirty in the morning he knocked on Clevie’s window and Clevie, who could be relied on to be awake for almost any reason, came to the door immediately.

The three of them were at the bakery by six.

The prep table, on close examination, had something on it that shouldn’t have been there: a faint dusting of what appeared to be white powder that was not flour. Flour was what Miss Miriam worked with and she knew flour in all its states, and this was not flour. It was finer. It lay in a pattern that suggested it had been spilled or shaken rather than scooped — a wide, loose scatter concentrated near the left corner of the table.

Benji had been pointing at this since before Miss Miriam arrived.

“Don’t touch it,” Omar said.

“I know not to touch it,” Nadine said.

“What is it?” Clevie said.

They leaned close without touching. It had no particular smell that any of them could detect. It was simply there: fine, white, in a scatter pattern, at the prep table where Miss Miriam made bread every morning.

“Someone came in,” Omar said. “Opened the back door — with a key, or picked the lock, we don’t know. Came to the prep table specifically. Left this. Went out.”

“Took nothing,” Nadine said.

“Took nothing.”

“Left something.”

“Someone wanted it in the bread,” Clevie said.

They were all quiet for a moment.

“We don’t know that,” Omar said.

“Why else leave it on the prep table?” Clevie said. “It’s not the cash register. It’s not the equipment. It’s specifically the table where the bread gets made.”

“We need to know what it is before we can say what it’s for,” Nadine said. “And we need an adult.”

The adult was Sergeant Peart, who arrived at six-forty with the expression of a man who had seen things that surprised him and was prepared, this morning, for one more.

He looked at the prep table. He took out his own notebook. He asked Miss Miriam how many people had a key to the back door, which was three: herself, her son who helped on weekends, and a key kept at Mr. Chin’s shop for emergencies.

“Your son,” he said.

“Michael is in Montego Bay,” Miss Miriam said. “Since Monday. For work.”

“The key at Mr. Chin’s.”

“I’ve had that arrangement for fifteen years. Mr. Chin has had that key for fifteen years and I have never once had a problem.”

“So someone who knew about the key at Mr. Chin’s,” Sergeant Peart said.

“Someone who had access to the shop long enough to make a copy,” Omar said.

Sergeant Peart looked at him.

“The back arrangement,” Omar said carefully. “At Mr. Chin’s. Things left and collected without a lot of questions.” He paused. “Someone who used that arrangement would know the shop well enough to know where keys were kept.”

Sergeant Peart wrote something.

“How old are you?” he said to Omar.

“Eleven,” Omar said.

Sergeant Peart wrote something else. “The powder is going for analysis,” he said. “In the meantime, Miss Miriam does not use that prep table today.”

“I have bread to make,” Miss Miriam said.

“Today,” he said firmly, “you make it on the other table.”

The powder came back as harmless. Bicarbonate of soda, specifically — common baking product, nothing dangerous. This was the mystery that replaced the previous mystery: someone had broken into a bakery, in the middle of the night, and left bicarbonate of soda on the prep table.

“A message,” Nadine said, when the three of them convened at the lane that afternoon. “Not a contamination. A message.”

“What does bicarbonate of soda mean?” Clevie said.

“I don’t know. But it means something to someone.”

“A threat?” Omar said. “Like — we could have put something real here.”

“Maybe,” Nadine said.

“Or it means something specific about the bakery,” Omar said slowly. He was thinking about Mr. Chin’s back arrangement, and about the key, and about who would know about it. “Miss Miriam has been making bread for twenty-two years. The bakery has a contract — it supplies the school canteen, the community centre, three other places. It’s not a small operation.”

“Someone wants something from her,” Nadine said.

“The contract,” Omar said. “Someone wants the contract and wants her to know they’re watching.”

It took Sergeant Peart another week to get to the bottom of it, and the three children were not told all the details. What they understood was this: a bakery supplier who had been trying to win Miss Miriam’s contract for two years had decided to make a point about what he could do if he chose to do more than leave bicarbonate of soda. The point was made. The contract was not renegotiated. Miss Miriam reported it and cooperated fully with the investigation and changed her locks, which she should have done three years ago.

She also, at the end of it, did something that none of the children expected: she made Benji a loaf.

A small one, specifically sized for a dog, made from the same recipe she used for everything but without salt, which Miss Miriam had read somewhere was not good for dogs.

She put it outside the back door.

Benji ate it.

He ate it slowly and with complete attention, which was how he ate things that were worth eating.

Miss Miriam watched from the doorway.

“Twenty-two years,” she said. “Nobody ever left me a loaf at the back door before.” She looked at the dog. “We’re square, you and me.”

Benji looked up at her.

His tail moved once. Agreement.