Witchcraft and nasty little murders

Chapter Three Secrets

The campus consisted of a series of narrow alleys lined with European-style, old-fashioned buildings. The area was called Gaxburn State University, but everyone just abbreviated it GSU. City planners thought it would be a good idea to have a Harvard-type university on the edge of the metropolis, attracting both local and foreign students. From there came the beautiful, ornate buildings, which created their own little jewel-box city within the metropolis.

Ophelia was running late, her boots clacking loudly on the pavement. With her second coffee in hand, she marched into the campus town. She stubbed out her cigarette as she entered one of the fancy buildings. The woman found herself in a small lecture room, where she had to be present. Blessed twilight greeted her in the room as they prepared to project. She set her bag down on the teacher's desk as she adjusted her black leather skirt, black, slightly see-through shirt, which was folded up to her elbows. Her steel-toed boots ended just below her knees, and she dressed that day as she felt like it: black.

"That's the teacher's desk," said a student in the front row. Ophelia froze in mid-motion, the purpose of which was to take her flash drive out of her bag. She glanced at the guy in his mid-twenties.

"I'm Dr. Ophelia Goodwin," she said as she straightened up and walked to the other side of the teacher's desk. Then leaned her buttocks against it to face the undergraduates, who, as correspondence students, numbered no more than thirty. "I'm teaching the Introduction to Linguistics course today, Mr. Brown asked me, as he had to travel on important business."

"What's your field?" asked the guy in the front row, who was scrutinising Ophelia while the others leaned over their laptops, bored.

"I'm a computational linguist, I analyze data. I work with phonologists, neurologists and neurolinguists. I analyze the data that comes from them. We try to detect neurodegenerative disorders at an early stage."

"So if I were to have a conversation with you over a coffee, could you tell me if I'm going to get Alzheimer's?" he grinned cheekily.

"Only if I record our conversation and if you're already in the early stages of the disease. We don't make predictions."

"Cool!" the guy said as he leaned forward. "If you want to experiment, I'm at your service."

"I'll be sure to let Mr. Brown know that he has such an enthusiastic undergraduate," Ophelia smiled as she shook him off. "And the experimenters would certainly appreciate it if you volunteered to be a control."

"I'd prefer the idea of coffee..." he said, just as the door opened and a tall, haggard figure appeared. He stomped noisily down the staircase to find a seat on one of the circular benches.

"I don't believe it!" Ophelia sighed as she identified the newcomer as the detective. "Excuse me, I have a class."

"I thought anyone can attend university classes," came the grumpy reply. "Go on!"

Ophelia swallowed a swear word and tried to keep herself busy with her lesson, but in addition to her hangover, the presence of the detective tormented her.

"Mr. Brown said each class should be devoted to a particular area of linguistics. Although I personally would have preferred computational linguistics, I was assigned psycholinguistics. But never mind! Psycholinguistics is a hybrid of psychology and linguistics, if I can put it that way. Who has any idea what it is all about?" Ophelia asked, but there was no reply for a long time, then a hand swung up. To her great relief, it wasn't the hand of the guy in the front row.

It was a girl.

"The operation of language and mind," she suggested.

"There are many branches, but in fact it is the relationship between language and thought, children's language acquisition, reading and various language disorders." The boy in the front row whispered something to his friends behind him, which made them grin. "Could you share it with us?" she asked, but he shook his head and said: