Benji and the Old Church Wall

The old church at the top of Cliffside Lane was not the church anyone used anymore.

The congregation had a new building two streets over, built twenty years ago, and the old building had been maintained in a general way — roof patched, gate kept locked, the yard kept clear by an arrangement with a man who lived nearby — but it was not used for services. It had been built in 1891 and the neighbourhood kept it standing because it had been standing for a hundred and thirty years and taking it down felt wrong.

The churchyard at the back was old. The graves there were old. Most of the names on them belonged to people nobody living had known personally.

Benji was at the back wall of the churchyard on a Sunday morning.

Not at the gate — at the back wall, which faced the lane behind the church. The same lane where, in a previous story, the mango tree mystery had begun. The same wall that anyone could see from the lane.

“Again with this lane,” Clevie said.

“It’s a useful lane,” Nadine said.

“For trouble.”

“For getting to places without being seen from the front.”

The back wall of the old churchyard was stone, old stone, thick and well-built. It had been built the same year as the church and had stood the same length of time. There were three flat stones at the base of the wall on the lane side, which had been there as long as anyone remembered and which the neighbourhood used as informal seating when the lane was busy.

Two of the three flat stones had been moved.

Not far. About two feet from their original position. Recent — the earth under where they had been was fresh, undisturbed from the outside, but the impression in the ground showed where they had sat for a hundred years.

Under the stones — under where the stones had been — the earth had been disturbed.

Not dug up. Pressed. Something had been placed and the stones had been replaced on top and someone had, sometime after, moved the stones away. Or tried to access what was under them.

Benji was sitting on the third stone, which had not been moved.

“Someone hid something here,” Omar said. “Under the stones.”

“Or someone put something here long ago and someone else found it recently,” Nadine said.

“What would you put under a churchyard wall?”

“Things you didn’t want found,” Clevie said. “Or things you wanted kept safe without a lock.”

They went to the man who maintained the yard — Mr. Everton, who lived on the lane and had the arrangement with the church for the past twelve years. He was seventy and had grey at his temples and the specific patience of a man who spent his time making slow things last.

He listened to the description of the moved stones.

He went quiet for a moment.

“My grandmother used to talk about the wall,” he said finally. “She said her mother said there were things put into the walls and under the stones when the church was first built. Not buried — set. For the building. Old practice. Things for good fortune.”

“What kind of things?” Omar said.

“Bible pages. Coins. Things that had meaning.” He thought. “And sometimes practical things. Deeds. Papers that needed to survive floods and fires.”

“Papers,” Nadine said.

“Under stones are safer than in houses,” he said. “In a flood year, you lose your house and your deed both. Under the wall, the deed survives.”

“You think there was a deed under those stones?” Omar said.

“I think,” Mr. Everton said carefully, “that my grandmother told me a story about a deed and a stone and the back of the old churchyard, and I thought it was the kind of story old people told. And then someone moved those stones.”

The deed was not there when Sergeant Peart’s colleague came with the appropriate tools and permissions from the church committee. But the impression in the earth showed that something had been there — a flat object, rectangular, the size and shape of folded papers.

Something had been removed. Recently, within the month. The earth was that fresh.

The deed — if it was a deed — would have been for land. Specific land. In Cliffside. Land that had been the subject of a dispute for the past two years between two families who each claimed inheritance from a common ancestor.

Sergeant Peart made a phone call.

The Everton family made phone calls.

The church committee made phone calls.

The three children were not part of any of these phone calls, but the shape of what had happened became clearer over time: someone had known about the stone cache, had known there was documentation there, and had accessed it to remove evidence that complicated a property claim.

Who that was took longer to establish.

What Benji had done was simpler: he had come to the wall on a Sunday morning and found the moved stones and waited for someone to understand what the moved stones meant.

Omar wrote in his notebook that evening: Today was about something under stones that was put there a long time ago by people who are gone now. The importance of old things. Benji found it the way he finds everything — by noticing what’s different. Something was different about those three stones and he noticed.

He thought about Mr. Everton’s grandmother, and her mother, and the story about the deed.

He knows the neighbourhood, Omar wrote. But I think he also knows the neighbourhood’s history. He knows how the lane has been used. He knows which walls matter. He knows more than he’s been alive long enough to know, unless—

He stopped writing.

He thought about that.

He wrote: Unless dogs carry knowledge differently than people do. Unless Benji knows Cliffside because Cliffside’s dogs have known Cliffside for longer than any of us.

He read it back.

It was, he decided, not a crazy thought.