The
Menu Case
My name is Slade. I’m a private eye. I’ve seen a lot of
cases, some funny, some sad, some etched in my memory, some forgotten
the day after I closed them. But I have never had a case like the Menu
file.
The man walked into my office and sat down before I
invited him to. He was obviously distraught, so I forgave the breach of
etiquette.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“It’s the Menus,” he said.
“Let me guess. You own a restaurant, someone has
been stealing your menus, and you want me to find the thief.”
“No! no! I mean Arthur and Alanna Menu. They’re
people.”
“Someone stole them?” Sometimes I’m sarcastic. It
goes with the job. The the edge of his mouth twitched upwards in a
smile he didn’t really mean.
“You could say that,” he said.
“Tell me more.”
“I’m an old friend of theirs. After not seeing them
for five years I spent the past week visiting them at their home in
Sidney. I didn’t notice anything at first, but by the third day I began
to feel strange. Something was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on
it. I returned home but I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Finally this
morning the penny dropped. Their lives are too boring to be true. Maybe
you’ll think I’m crazy, but I believe some entity, either foreign
or....” He paused. “...extraterrestrial...has taken over their minds!”
I did think he was crazy. But the way he was dressed said he could
afford me, and I don’t come cheap.
“Like I said before, what can I do for you?”
“Look into it. If you think I’m nuts, I’ll let it
go.”
And that’s how it began. When they were both at work
I broke into their small rented two- bedroom bungalow at 9875 Seventh
Street near the heart of the sleepy retirement community of Sidney, or
as the locals like to call it, Sidney-by-the-Sea.The furniture was
cheap and well used. Neither of them were tidiness freaks. They left a
personal computer on all the time, probably to receive faxes. Judging
from the depth of paper that covered the computer desk and the stacks
of floppy diskettes, they spent a lot of time on the PC. The fridge was
full of leftovers in plastic containers. I opened a few and smelled.
They seemed not too old and looked pretty good. These people didn’t eat
expensively, but they ate well. I found bottles of red wine that came
from a brew-it-yourself place. From the labels I could tell there were
unopened bottles from the past three batches. From the dust, the oldest
bottles looked to be laid down three years ago. Three dozen empties. So
they liked their wine but didn’t drink a lot of it. In the living room
there was a small live spruce tree in a pot with freshly dried mud on
it. It had obviously been brought in from outside. Partly opened boxes
of Christmas decorations sat on the floor nearby. Christmas was only a
week away and they still hadn’t decorated the tree. I was willing to
bet they were late sending their Christmas cards every year. In one of
the bedrooms there was a paper covered desk and another desk with a new
computer. Why did they need two computers?
I planted some listening devices in places they
wouldn’t see them. I never worry about people who don’t dust regularly
finding my bugs. I left the house and checked their single-car sized
detached garage. It was full of boxes and junk. Abird cage hung
forlornly from a stand. They once had a bird. There were some cat
grooming brushes as well. They once had a cat. But now they had no
pets. I wondered why.
For the next week I listened to tapes of their
conversations at home and on the phone. It made things a lot clearer.
Arthur was a hospital chaplain looking after four small long-term care
hospitals in Victoria. He presented himself as a non-denominational
chaplain but both he and Alanna attended local Catholic and United
churches every weekend.
Arthur’s manager told him he was doing a good job
but the job was too big for one person and Arthur spent a lot of time
trying to find, train and supervise volunteers to help him provide
pastoral and spiritual care for the elderly residents in the hospitals.
He sometimes thought of himself as more of a coordinator of volunteers
than a chaplain who provided hands-on pastoral care. But every time he
celebrated a memorial service for residents who had recently died,
which he did six times every month in six different units, he realized
that he really had a chaplaincy ministry. And he believed that the
prayers he prayed every day for the residents and their families and
the staff did make a difference. He only wished he could prove that to
the people who set the budget for Pastoral/Spiritual Care in the
Capital Health Region.
Alanna worked for a branch of the St. Vincent de
Paul Society called Ozanam. It provided a day program for adults with
developmental disabilities.
Alanna liked her job. “Where else can I get paid for
having fun?” I heard her say more than once to Arthur. Some days she
would supervise clients sorting and packaging buttons that would be
sold in the St. Vincent de Paul stores. I wondered if I had ever seen
buttons for sale on the few occasions I had looked for a bargain at a
St. Vincent de Paul store. But I wasn’t poor like most of the people
who shopped there and hoped to find what they needed among all the used
clothing and goods. What would the poor folks do without the St.
Vincent de Paul and Salvation Army thrift stores?
Some days Alanna would take a group of clients for
an outing, putting her Class 4 driver’s license to good use. She had
special responsibility for a couple clients who needed a firm hand from
time to time, and then it wasn’t so much fun. But she was good at her
job and her fellow workers respected her.
Alanna also had a part-time job as secretary of the
Victoria Presbytery of the United Church of Canada. A United Church
presbytery is a sort of council made up of representatives of all the
United Church congregations in a region, and it exercises a supervisory
role over those congregations. She took and distributed minutes of
Presbytery meetings and handled other kinds of paperwork. I began to
see why she and Arthur might need two computers at home.
Alanna was also a member of the council of St.
Paul’s United Church in Sidney. She formally joined the United Church
in the fall while retaining her membership in the Catholic Church.
After listening to the tapes and staking out the
Menu residence, I began to see what the guy who hired me meant about
their leading a boring life. Every weekday morning Arthur would get up
and cook a pot of oatmeal porridge, read the paper, shower, and go to
work. Alanna had her routine as well. Saturday morning they slept in,
Arthur cooked himself bacon and eggs and Alanna had the same brand of
cold cereal with a banana. Sunday they both ate cold cereal with a
banana. For entertainment they read books, Alanna mysteries and Arthur
science fiction. Home, work, church and the public library—that about
summed up their life.
Could my client’s suspicions be right? Could the
Menus be brainwashed zombies under the control of a foreign power or
extraterrestrial? I redoubled my investigative efforts. I studied them
like I have never studied anyone before. It took a month but in the end
I had all the evidence I needed and I was ready when my client came for
my report.
“So?” he asked. I searched for the right words.
“Yeah, you look at them, even look hard at them, and
the boredom of their day-to-day life makes an impression. Who’s pulling
their strings, you wonder? But dig deep, real deep, and what you find
is they live a very rich and varied life of the imagination. Their
devotion to reading and writing gave me the clue. Then I attended a few
church services where they filled in for the minister and I heard them
preach. You had to ask yourself, where did this sermon come from? They
lead a boring life, but it’s a thoughtful boring life. I can only
conclude that the Menus find more in the humdrum events of daily life
than you might think.” My client frowned.
“That’s it? That’s all?”
“Well, maybe one thing more. Arthur and Alanna are
pretty religious. A little off the deep end to my way of thinking. So
maybe you were right. Maybe they are under the influence of an
extraterrestrial...if you want to think of God that way.”
That’s how the case ended. And if you happen to be
reading this around Christmas, have a merry one.
And a merry Christmas from us too!
Art and Alanna