to kill a mocking bird initial response

To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about the narrator’s childhood growing up in a vapid neighborhood in Maycomb County, Alabama. The narrator is Jean Louise Finch, Scout, and her brother Jem always enjoy playing with Dill, who comes from Mississippi to spend the summer with one of Jem and Scout’s neighbors. Scout’s dad is Atticus. His vocation was a lawyer and state legislator; he is very well respected throughout the county. One day while Scout was walking home after her easy first grade school day, she sees tinfoil in the knothole of a tree in the infamous Radley Place. She removes the tinfoil and reveals a wad of chewing gum which she promptly puts in her mouth. On the last day of school she finds Indian-Head pennies in the same knothole. Over the summer, Dill and Jem distance themselves from Scout to plan a way to get Boo Radley out of the house. There are many theories or legends about the Radleys and nobody truly fathoms why Boo Radley stays in the house all day but one theory is that he is an extremely devoted Baptist that he is too worried about his next life (heaven or hell) that he forgets to live his current life. But then on Dill’s last day in Maycomb, Dill, Jem and Scout embark at night to peek through the window. But a large shadow creeps up on them and they bolt for the fence and hear a shotgun go off behind them. Jem’s pants got caught in fence when they fled and when Jem goes back to get them later that night, and they were sloppily stitched up and folded on the top of the fence. Then as school start they find grey twine, two soap figures that resemble Jem and Scout, more chewing gum, a spelling bee medal, and an old pocket watch on separate occassions. One day the hole is filled with cement and Nathan Radley said that he plugged it because the tree was dying.
I was confused about the knotholes that odd things kept winding up in because who would use that as a hiding place and if what you put in the hole keeps disappearing, why put valuables in