Benji and the Library Book

The Cliffside community library was one room in the community centre building, tended by a retired teacher named Miss Norma who had been running it voluntarily for fourteen years. It had four hundred and twelve books. Miss Norma knew every one of them.

She knew, therefore, the moment the book came back wrong.

It was a reference book — a Caribbean history encyclopaedia, one of only two copies in the library, the other having been borrowed and never returned seven years ago. When the first copy was checked back in on a Thursday, Miss Norma opened it during her evening audit and found that pages 47 through 58 were missing. Not torn — cut. Precisely, with something sharp, along the binding fold.

Benji had been sitting at the returns shelf since the book arrived.

“Someone needed specific pages,” Omar said. “And couldn’t borrow the book because—”

“Because it doesn’t circulate,” Nadine said. “Reference books stay in the library. You can read them here. You can’t take them home.”

“So they cut the pages out,” Clevie said.

“Pages 47 to 58,” Omar said. “What’s on pages 47 to 58?”

Miss Norma, who had memorised the encyclopaedia’s contents the way a person memorised their own yard, said: “The history of land grants in the Caribbean, 1944 to 1968. Specific grants by parish. St. Catherine, St. Andrew, Kingston.”

They were quiet.

“Land grants,” Nadine said.

“Parish of St. Catherine,” Omar said.

“Which is where Cliffside is,” Clevie said.

The book had been borrowed — read in the library, which was permitted — by someone who had signed the reading register. The register showed: Tuesday afternoon, four o’clock, a name written in careful, large letters: DESMOND HALL.

“Who is Desmond Hall?” Clevie said.

“A man who was trying to prove something about a piece of land in St. Catherine,” Nadine said carefully. “The kind of proof you’d need pages from a land grants record to support.”

“The property dispute,” Omar said. “Like the church wall deed. It’s not over.”

“The deed was removed from the wall. The information in the deed might be in other records. If you know which land grants to look for — which pages to reference—”

“You cut them out,” Omar said. “So nobody else can look them up.”

“You don’t destroy the information,” Nadine said. “You remove access to it for others.”

Miss Norma, when given the name from the register and the explanation, made one phone call — to her nephew who worked at the parish council records office — and established that the missing pages corresponded to three specific land grants that were currently relevant to an ongoing dispute.

She filed a report with the library committee and with Sergeant Peart.

She also, because she was Miss Norma and she had been running this library for fourteen years and she was not going to let this be the end of it, sat down with Omar’s notebook and reconstructed from memory the contents of pages 47 through 58. She did not have it word for word. But she had the grant numbers, the dates, and the parcel descriptions. She had read those pages many times.

“You memorised them?” Clevie said.

“I memorised the whole book,” she said. “It took three years. You have four hundred and twelve books in a library you love, you learn what’s in them.”

She looked at the gap where the pages had been and then looked at her reconstructed notes.

“These things don’t just exist in one place,” she said. “Knowledge keeps itself. That’s the point of a library.”

Benji, who had remained at the returns shelf through all of this, stood up when Miss Norma finished her reconstruction. He walked to the door. Done.

“He stays until the thing is handled,” Clevie said.

“He stays until knowledge is restored,” Nadine said.

“That’s the same thing,” Omar said.

“Not always,” she said.