Benji and the Harbour Master's Cat

Quarter Three opened at the waterfront.

The crew did not go to the Kingston waterfront often. It was a distance from Cliffside, it required a bus and a walk, and it was not the kind of place you went without a specific reason. The specific reason this time was Clevie’s mother, who had taken a catering job at an event at the waterfront on a Saturday and had brought Clevie along to help carry, and Clevie had brought Omar and Nadine because he always brought Omar and Nadine.

Benji was already there.

This should no longer have surprised them. It still slightly surprised them.

“He was here before the bus,” Clevie said.

“He’s always before the bus,” Omar said.

“One day I want to know how he gets places.”

“One day,” Nadine said, “I think we might find out and wish we hadn’t asked.”

Benji was at the perimeter fence of the restricted harbour section — not the public waterfront, the working harbour beyond it, with the shipping containers and the equipment and the authority signs. He was sitting at a specific point in the fence, looking through it with the attention he used when something needed finding.

The cat was visible once they got close enough. Tabby, medium-sized, sitting on top of a pallet about thirty feet inside the restricted area. Looking at Benji through the fence with the expression cats reserved for dogs they had decided were not an immediate threat.

“It’s just a cat,” Clevie said.

“It’s in a restricted area,” Omar said.

“Animals go into restricted areas all the time. It’ll come out when it wants to.”

Nadine was looking at the cat more carefully. “The cat isn’t moving,” she said. “It’s been on that pallet a while.”

“How do you know?”

“The way it’s sitting. It’s not exploring. It found a place and stopped.” She looked at the fence. “It’s been in there long enough that it’s not sure how to get back out.”

“The fence has gaps lower down,” Omar said. “It could have come in through one too small to exit when fully grown—”

“Or the gaps have shifted,” she said. “The fence is old. They move.”

Benji looked at them. Looked at the cat. Looked at the fence section to the left, where the base had lifted slightly from the ground.

“That’s where it came in,” Nadine said.

“And can’t get back through because it’s been in there a while and ate something,” Omar said. “Cats eat and then can’t fit through the spaces they came in through. Basic physics.”

“How do you know that?”

“My cousin’s cat does it with the kitchen cabinet.”

The harbour master was a large, efficient woman named Captain Morrison who, when approached by three children and a dog on a Saturday morning, listened to the situation and walked with them to the relevant fence section and looked through it and said: “Oh. That’s Patches. She lives in the admin building. She’s been missing since Thursday.”

She radioed someone.

A man came with keys.

Patches was retrieved from the pallet, examined, found to be fine if hungry, and carried back to the admin building.

Captain Morrison looked at Benji.

“You were watching her for two days?” she said.

Benji looked at the place where Patches had been.

“I suppose you were,” she said.

She did not ask how a dog from Cliffside had come to the Kingston waterfront to watch a cat that had been missing for two days. She was a harbour master and she had seen stranger things in the water and she had learned to accept useful information from whatever source provided it.

She went back to her office.

The man who had retrieved Patches offered the children a biscuit tin from the admin building’s kitchen. They accepted.

Benji did not accept a biscuit. He had located the cat. The cat was back. That was sufficient.

“He watches cats too,” Clevie said.

“He watches anything that needs watching,” Nadine said.

“Does he like cats?”

“He doesn’t dislike them,” Omar said. “He’s indifferent. But if a cat needs finding, he finds it.”

“He just finds things,” Clevie said.

“He finds things,” Omar agreed. “And then he finds us.”