Benji and the Mango Tree Mystery

The biggest mango tree in Cliffside stood at the back of Mr. Adolphus’s yard, and it was, by everyone’s agreement, a community tree.

Not legally. Legally it was Mr. Adolphus’s tree, on Mr. Adolphus’s land, and it had been there since before Mr. Adolphus was born and would probably be there after everyone alive in Cliffside was gone. But Mr. Adolphus was eighty-one years old and had been sharing the mangoes with the neighbourhood his entire life, and the neighbourhood had understood for sixty of those years that when the tree bore fruit, the fruit was for everyone.

The system worked simply: you came to the yard, you asked, Mr. Adolphus said yes or you came back tomorrow, you took what was reasonable, you left.

This was why Clevie’s face was doing something unusual when Omar found him at the corner Wednesday morning.

“Mr. Adolphus said the tree’s been robbed,” Clevie said.

Omar stopped walking. “Robbed how?”

“Three nights. Someone comes in the night and takes everything that dropped that day. Clean. Nothing left.”

“Why doesn’t he come in the day?”

“He’s eighty-one and his hip is bad and he can’t make it to the back of the yard without his granddaughter helping him.” Clevie’s face was still doing the unusual thing. “He says someone’s been taking all of it. Selling it, maybe. There’s a stall on the road with Adolphus mangoes — he can tell his own tree’s fruit — and whoever is running it hasn’t come to ask.”

Omar thought about this.

“Where’s Benji?” he said.

“Under the mango tree,” Clevie said. “Since last night, apparently. Miss Adolphus said when she went to check on her grandfather this morning, the dog was already there.”

Nadine met them at Mr. Adolphus’s gate.

She had already spoken to Miss Adolphus — the granddaughter, a woman of forty who visited every day and was currently extremely concerned about her grandfather being disturbed and also about the mangoes, though she put the grandfather first. She had confirmed that the tree had produced well this week and that for three days running the yield on the ground had been zero by morning when it should have been substantial.

Benji was under the tree.

He looked at the three of them when they came through the gate and then looked at the base of the wall on the north side of the yard. The wall that backed onto the lane.

“Someone comes over the wall,” Omar said.

“That’s the lane,” Nadine said. “Anyone could come and go without being seen.”

“At night,” Clevie said. “When Mr. Adolphus is asleep.”

They looked at the wall. It was old stone, chest-height on an adult, head-height on them. There were scuff marks on the top — recent ones, the limestone showing pale where something had scraped.

Benji walked to a spot three feet from the wall and sat down. He looked at something on the ground.

Omar crouched.

In the dirt, faint but readable: a partial boot print. Not a shoe — a work boot, heavy sole, wide.

“That’s not a child,” Nadine said.

“No,” Omar agreed. He took out his notebook and drew the print shape. “But it’s not a large adult either. Fourteen, fifteen maybe.”

“Old enough to be selling at a roadside stall,” Clevie said. He had been quiet for a moment. “My sister passed a stall on the main road yesterday. Boy about that age. She said he had Julie mangoes and Bombay and East Indian all mixed in together. She bought some — she said they were the best she’d had all season.”

“Which house on the lane has a boy that age?” Omar said.

They all thought about this.

The lane had seven houses.

“The Jacksons moved in at number four,” Nadine said. “They have a son. His name is Raymond. He’s in the secondary school.”

“Fourteen,” Clevie said.

“Something like that.”

Clevie wanted to go directly to the Jacksons.

“And say what?” Nadine said.

“Say we know it was them.”

“We don’t know it was them. We have a boot print and a mango stall.”

“And Benji looked at the wall.”

“We cannot go to somebody’s family and say a dog looked at your wall and we believe your son is the thief.”

Clevie found this extremely frustrating.

“What then?” he said.

“We find out for certain,” Nadine said. “And we find out why.”

This was, Omar reflected, the part of the process that Benji had never needed to explain to him, because Benji was a dog and dogs did not have to deal with the human complications of knowing a thing versus being able to prove a thing versus understanding a thing before acting on it. Benji found the scent and sat down and looked at them. The rest — the why and the how and the what to do about it — was theirs.

He wrote in his notebook: Benji finds the what. We figure out the why. The why usually changes what should happen next.

They walked to the roadside stall at lunchtime.

The boy behind the table was fourteen or fifteen, as Clevie had guessed, tall and thin with long hands that sorted fruit quickly and efficiently. He had five types of mango arrayed in neat rows. His prices were good. He had customers.

He also had, in a bag behind his stool, more fruit waiting — enough to stock a stall for several days.

Clevie bought one mango and ate it while they walked away.

“Adolphus,” he said.

“Yes,” Nadine said. She had tasted one too.

“Definitely Adolphus tree.”

“Yes.”

Omar had been thinking. He stopped walking. “He knows the tree,” he said.

“What?”

“The way those mangoes are sorted — by variety, by ripeness, by size. He knows the tree. He knows which part of the tree gives which fruit. You don’t sort like that unless you’ve been picking from a specific tree for a while.” He paused. “Not three days. Longer.”

“He’s been doing this longer than three days?” Nadine said.

“I think the three days is the first time someone noticed. I think he’s been coming all season.” Omar looked back at the stall. “And if he’s been coming all season and Mr. Adolphus never noticed, then Raymond — if it’s Raymond — knows the old man’s schedule. Knows when he can and can’t come to the back yard.”

Clevie had gone quiet again with the unusual expression.

“He knows the tree,” Clevie said slowly. “He knows the yard. He knows when the old man can’t come out.”

“Yes.”

“His family just moved here. They’ve been here since—”

“Since the start of the season,” Nadine said. “The same time the best fruit started dropping.”

Miss Adolphus was the right adult to talk to. She listened to the three children with the expression of someone who had already been worried about something related and was now hearing the rest of the picture.

She did not go to the Jacksons immediately. She went to Raymond.

She met him at his stall at four o’clock and sat across from him and talked to him for twenty minutes, and the three children were not there for this because Miss Adolphus said this was a conversation between adults and very-nearly-adults and she would tell them what they needed to know.

What she told them, later, was this:

Raymond Jackson had lived in the neighbourhood they moved from for twelve years and had known an old man there with a mango tree and had helped in the yard every season and received a share of the fruit and used it to run a small stall. When his family moved, the old man had died, and Raymond had needed a new tree, and the Adolphus tree was visible from the lane, and he had come over the wall.

He had not asked. He knew he should have asked. He hadn’t asked because he was new and didn’t know Mr. Adolphus and felt strange about asking, which was, Miss Adolphus said, something she understood, even though the not-asking had been wrong.

The money from the stall went to his family, not to himself.

“How much?” Omar asked, when Miss Adolphus told them.

She named an amount.

Clevie whistled.

“Good business,” he said. Then, at Nadine’s expression: “Still wrong. But good business.”

Mr. Adolphus and Raymond met the following Saturday morning under the mango tree.

Mr. Adolphus was eighty-one and had been sharing mangoes his whole life and was not, as it turned out, particularly interested in punishment. He was interested in the arrangement being done correctly.

Raymond would come in the mornings, properly, through the gate. He would take an agreed share. He would sell the fruit. He would give ten percent of what he made to Mr. Adolphus, not as payment — Mr. Adolphus did not need the money — but as the arrangement’s acknowledgment that the tree belonged to someone.

Raymond, who had been frightened and then relieved and then slightly overwhelmed by Mr. Adolphus being eighty-one and completely calm about the whole thing, agreed to all of this immediately.

Benji was at the base of the tree for this conversation.

When it was done, he stood up, stretched, and walked out through the gate.

Work complete.

“He came for a resolution,” Nadine said.

“He always does,” Omar said.

Clevie ate the mango Mr. Adolphus had given him as a visitor’s gift and thought about the word arrangement and about the specific thing that had happened here, which was not quite justice and not quite punishment but was somehow more correct than either.

“That old man,” Clevie said.

“Yes,” Nadine said.

“He’s something, ennuh.”

“Yes,” she said. “He is.”