Benji and the Fisherman's Secret

The dog had been sitting by the water since before sunrise.

Miss Etta noticed him first, on her way to open the shop, a small brown shape at the end of the jetty with his nose pointed toward the harbour. She thought nothing of it — dogs sat on jetties. It was a thing dogs did. She opened her shop and thought about other things.

By the time the fishing boats came in at eight o’clock, the dog was still there.

By nine, when Nadine arrived at her great-uncle’s house for the weekend visit her grandmother sent her on every few months, the dog was so thoroughly at home on the jetty that two of the fishermen had started walking around him.

Nadine stopped at the top of the path and looked at the dog.

The dog looked back at her.

He had amber eyes and one ear up and one ear down and a patch of fur missing behind his right ear in the shape of a star.

“How,” she said.

Benji looked at her, then looked at the boats, then looked at her again.

“That’s not an answer.”

He looked at the boats.

She put her bag down at her great-uncle’s gate and went to the jetty.

His name was Benji, and he was from Cliffside, which was forty-five minutes away by bus, and Nadine had no idea how he had arrived at this particular harbour in this particular village on this particular morning. She had taken the bus herself, and she had not seen him on it. She had been watching for three stops.

What she knew about Benji was this: he did not go places without reasons. He had a nose that was, as far as she could tell, never wrong. And he looked at things the way her grandmother looked at things she was deciding whether to speak about: steady, patient, already knowing, waiting for the right moment.

He was not on this jetty because he liked jetties.

“Show me,” she said.

He stood up and walked to the end of the jetty, past two fishing boats already unloaded and a third still being worked on. He stopped beside a large cooler — the kind used to transport catch on ice — that was sitting slightly apart from the others. Not unloaded yet. Nobody working on it. Just sitting.

He sat beside it.

He looked at Nadine.

She looked at the cooler.

It was a perfectly normal cooler, large and white and salt-scuffed. The kind you saw at any fishing village. Her great-uncle Mr. Basil ran his own boat — he was out on the water now, hadn’t come in yet — and he had three like this in his shed.

She looked at Benji.

He put his paw on the cooler.

She crouched beside it and put her ear near the edge.

For a moment she heard nothing.

Then she heard breathing.

Nadine stood up very slowly and walked, at a normal pace, back along the jetty to the shore. Her heart was doing something that hearts did when they were very surprised. She kept her face neutral, the way her grandmother had taught her to keep her face when you were in a situation and didn’t yet know who was watching.

She took out her phone.

She called Omar.

“Good morning,” Omar said. He was at home in Cliffside, probably in his room, probably doing Saturday things. She could hear Clevie in the background already.

“I need you and Clevie to come to Rocky Point,” she said.

A pause.

“Rocky Point is forty-five minutes away.”

“Yes.”

“It’s Saturday morning.”

“I know.”

“Why.”

She kept her voice very even. “Benji is here.”

Another pause.

“How is Benji in Rocky Point?”

“I don’t know. But there’s something in one of the fishing coolers on the jetty and it’s breathing.”

The longest pause.

“We’ll get the bus,” Omar said.

Great-Uncle Basil came in from the water at nine-thirty, and Nadine met him at the jetty with the information that she was very happy to be here and his house looked lovely and also could they sit and have something to eat before she explained a few things.

He was sixty-three years old and had been fishing these waters since he was twelve and he was not, he told her, the type of man to be worried by a ten-year-old niece being cautious.

But he let her feed him first.

By the time Omar and Clevie arrived on the eleven o’clock bus — out of breath and trying to act like they hadn’t run from the bus stop — she had understood several more things.

The cooler did not belong to any of the boats that had come in that morning. She had asked, carefully, around the question, whether anyone had left equipment on the jetty overnight. The answers were no, not as far as anyone knew.

The cooler had appeared sometime between the last boat going out the night before and the first one coming in this morning.

And Benji had been there since before sunrise.

“He knew it was coming,” she told Omar and Clevie, on the path above the jetty, while Basil sat at his table inside and drank his tea. “He came before it arrived. He was already here.”

“Forty-five minutes from Cliffside,” Clevie said. “How does he get to places? He doesn’t take the bus.”

“He doesn’t need to take the bus,” Nadine said. “He just arrives.”

Clevie looked at Benji. Benji was sitting beside a wall, watching them.

“That’s not a dog thing,” Clevie said. “Normal dogs don’t do that.”

“We’ve established,” Omar said, taking out his notebook, “that Benji is not a normal dog.” He wrote something. “What’s in the cooler?”

“Something breathing.”

“Something,” Clevie said. “Not someone.”

“I don’t know. It’s too small a breath for a person. Too regular for a person.” She thought. “An animal. Something alive.”

“And it’s in a cooler that nobody owns,” Omar said.

“On a fishing jetty,” Clevie said.

“That Benji arrived at before sunrise,” Omar said.

They all looked at Benji.

Benji looked at the jetty.

“We need to open it,” Nadine said.

“It’s not ours,” Omar said.

“No. But whatever’s in it doesn’t belong in a cooler on a jetty either.”

Great-Uncle Basil came with them. He was the adult, Nadine reasoned, and this was his jetty as much as anyone’s, and adults needed to be part of this particular next step.

She told him just enough: a cooler that didn’t belong to any of the morning boats. Something inside it. Worth checking.

He had been fishing for fifty-one years. He didn’t ask her how she knew. He picked up the cooler — it was heavier than expected, he said — and carried it to the shade of the shed at the end of the jetty.

He unlatched it.

Inside, packed in wet cloth and breathing very slowly, were three sea turtles.

Not large ones — young, maybe three or four years old, each about the size of a dinner plate. Hawksbill turtles. The kind that were protected under law, the kind that could not be caught or sold or transported, the kind that somebody had taken from somewhere and packed in this cooler and left on this jetty for somebody else to collect.

“Lord,” Great-Uncle Basil said.

He sat back on his heels and looked at them.

Nadine looked at Benji.

Benji was watching Great-Uncle Basil with his amber eyes, and his tail moved once.

The Fisheries officer arrived from Kingston by one o’clock. She was a woman named Miss Downer who was small and efficient and said very little and wrote a great deal in a notebook that was larger than Omar’s.

The turtles were alive, she said, and could be transferred to the sea turtle conservation facility in Port Royal. They would need monitoring but they would likely be fine.

Who had put them in the cooler and who had intended to collect them was a matter for the authorities, she said, and she would be leaving her card, and if any of them noticed anything they wanted to tell her, they should.

Great-Uncle Basil noticed Benji noticing something, which was how he put it, and that was how Miss Downer came to walk the jetty one more time. On the far side, behind one of the old storage barrels, she found a phone in a waterproof case, left there and not retrieved, with messages on it that answered several of her questions.

She said nothing to the children about this except: “Good morning’s work.”

The bus back to Cliffside left at four.

They sat in the back — Omar, Clevie, Nadine — and the bus was mostly empty and the late light was gold on the water as they crossed the causeway back toward Portmore.

Clevie had been quiet for twenty minutes, which was unusual.

“Three turtles,” he said finally.

“Yes,” Nadine said.

“Hawksbill. Protected.”

“Yes.”

“Someone was going to sell them.”

“Someone was.”

Clevie looked out the window. He was eleven years old and he had grown up in Cliffside where you could sometimes see dolphins in the harbour if you went early enough, and the idea of someone packing three sea turtles in a cooler on a jetty sat badly with him.

“Good thing Benji found them,” he said.

“Good thing,” Omar agreed.

They looked at the seat beside Nadine, where Benji was sitting in exactly the way a dog sat when it was not, officially, on this bus.

The bus driver, to his credit, said nothing.

He had been driving routes around Portmore for eighteen years, and he had seen stranger things than a small brown dog riding the four o’clock bus to Cliffside with three children, and he had learned not to ask.