Benji and the Cliffside Crew · Jamaica
Benji and the Midnight Visitor
Someone has been visiting the Cliffside cemetery at midnight for the past week, and Benji has been seeing it. The crew, finally, comes to see what he sees.
Miss Gloria’s garden was not a garden most people would have recognised as a garden.
It was a yard — a Jamaican yard, which meant it had purpose and logic that operated on different principles than the decorative English garden or the American suburb lawn. It had aloe vera near the fence because aloe vera was useful. It had christophine because christophine grew well here. It had three things nobody outside the yard could name, which Miss Gloria called by their names and which she used in specific preparations that Nadine had been learning since she was old enough to follow her grandmother to the yard in the mornings.
The yard also had, along the back fence, something that Miss Gloria had been growing for seven years: a plant that produced, twice a year, a berry used in one specific preparation for one specific condition, and which was not available at any market or pharmacy in Portmore, and which she had cultivated from a cutting sent by a sister in St. Elizabeth who was no longer living.
On the Wednesday of Q2’s final week, some of the berries were gone.
Not all of them. Enough that Miss Gloria noticed at her morning check, which she did the way she did everything: quietly, completely, without drama. She came inside. She sat at the table. She drank her tea.
Benji was at the gate when Nadine came out.
“Grandmother,” Nadine said. “What happened?”
“Someone came in the night,” Miss Gloria said. “Took some of the berries from the back fence plant.”
“How do you know it wasn’t an animal? A bird?”
“Birds don’t take whole clusters,” Miss Gloria said. “They peck. These were taken clean. By a hand.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“I heard the gate. I was sleeping. I am old.” She said this as a statement of fact, not a complaint. “Benji heard. Benji was at the gate.”
Nadine looked at the dog.
“He was there all night?” she said.
“He was there when I came out at five,” Miss Gloria said. “Which means he was there before.”
“But he didn’t—”
“He didn’t stop the person,” Miss Gloria said. She looked at Benji. “No. He waited. He knows the difference between a crime and a need.”
“What do you mean he knows the difference?” Clevie said, when Nadine told them.
“My grandmother means he didn’t bark. He didn’t chase whoever it was. He just watched.” She paused. “He does that. When someone is doing something wrong but the wrong is coming from a place of need, he doesn’t frighten them. He just—” she thought “—bears witness. And waits for us.”
“So we need to find someone who needed those berries,” Omar said. “Specifically those berries.”
“They’re not common,” Nadine said. “My grandmother is one of three people in the area who knows what they’re for. The other two are very old women. One of them—” she stopped.
“What?”
“Miss Ida on the next road. She came to see my grandmother two weeks ago. She was asking about the berries.” Nadine’s expression was careful and thoughtful. “For her son. He has a condition.”
“She came to ask and your grandmother said—”
“She said she’d give her some when they were ready. But they weren’t ready yet. And then they were ready and my grandmother hadn’t got around to telling her and—”
“And Miss Ida came at night,” Omar said, “because she was embarrassed to come in the day after she’d been told to wait.”
“Or because she was desperate,” Nadine said. “Or both.”
Nadine went to see Miss Ida.
Alone, because some conversations worked better without an audience.
She was there for an hour. When she came back she said: Miss Ida’s son had been having a difficult week. Miss Ida had known the berries were ready because she had passed the yard and seen them through the gate. She had come at midnight because she had not wanted to impose and she had told herself she would replace them, she would bring something to replace them, she was not a thief.
“She’s not a thief,” Nadine said to her grandmother.
“No,” Miss Gloria said. She was already in the yard. “Come with me.”
She took Nadine to the back fence plant and showed her which berries were left and how to harvest them properly, and then she took the full harvest inside and prepared what she prepared, and then she called Miss Ida and told her to come.
Miss Ida came at three o’clock.
They sat together at the table, two old women, and spoke in the way that old women who have known each other for forty years spoke, and Nadine made the tea and was mostly not listening except for the parts she was listening to, which told her about a friendship she had known existed but not known the depth of.
Benji was not at the gate when Miss Ida came. He was in the lane in the sun. His job, which had been to mark that something happened and wait for it to be handled the right way, was done.
“He knew it was Miss Ida,” Nadine said to Omar and Clevie, later. “He knew she wasn’t dangerous. He knew it was a need, not a theft.”
“How did he know?” Clevie said.
“He knows everyone in this neighbourhood,” Omar said. “He knows their smells. He knows their histories. Miss Ida — he’s seen her come to the yard before. He knew her.” He paused. “He made a judgment call. That she should be allowed to get what she came for without being scared off. And then he waited to make sure we found out in the right way.”
“The right way being Nadine going to talk to her,” Clevie said.
“Not Sergeant Peart,” Omar said. “Not a formal thing. Nadine. Who would understand the situation and handle it gently.”
Clevie looked at Benji in the sun.
“He trusts us,” he said.
“Yes,” Nadine said.
“He trusts us to handle things correctly.”
“He does.” She looked at the dog. “We should make sure we deserve that.”
Quarter Three begins: Benji and the Harbour Master’s Cat — Q3 opens at the Kingston waterfront, where a cat has gone into a restricted area and Benji has been watching the fence since morning.