by Kim Smulders & Rosa Zwaal
AFTER a long day of UCR class-es, twelve students gathered in the Bachtensteene common room. Lit-tle did they know a murder would take place later that night. Maybe they did, as they had come to the Murder Mystery Dinner! GamesCo and Cooking Society were collaborating to organize an activ-ity that was both scary and delicious. At first everything seemed fine, until par-ticipants started to disappear and they came back not quite like themselves. Don’t worry, these changes were not permanent! They just got a character assigned for that evening.
Then all of a sudden everyone started… cooking! Spices and vegetables were chopped, sweet potatoes were peeled and the participants grew hungry. After a few minutes of hard student labour the starter was served; bread with garlic butter and brie. Brie proved to be very important that night.
Europe’s greatest mime artist, ‘The Black Cat’, got murdered, people got accused or questioned and brie was eaten. The guests asked each other questions, trying to find out what had happened, and who the culprit was. In the meantime the Cooking Society board was working hard in the kitchen to get the main dish ready; a delicious, pretty much allergy-free (!) sweet po-tato curry. The recipe can be found on the Cooking Society Facebook page. Af-ter solving a few culinary emergencies (thanks to Jillis!), dinner was ready to be served.
All of the usual suspects had been rounded up. It had been a quiet evening. Too quiet for the lively town of Casablanca, 1942. Amongst them were a lot of peculiar, yet powerful people, who, of course, all had their own rea-sons why the Black Cat’s demise could benefit them. However, they were all innocent… according to them at least. Then came the evidence. Dark secrets were revealed, affairs were uncov-ered and suspicions arose. After all, everyone was a suspect, but who is the murderer? Had it been Hughes Le Grandbutte, the deputy mayor of this town? Or had it been his wife, Edith Le Grandbutte? She had certainly had a guilty look in her eyes that evening… Or had it been the abrasive Otto Von Pin-kelwurst? He had been quick to blame others, possibly in a desperate attempt to divert the attention from himself. Or perhaps it had been the cabaret sing-er Cherie Boot, who had been awfully quiet all evening. But it could also have been one of the other guests. There had been speculation enough, but who had done the vile deed in the end? Of course, we can’t tell you that, because we don’t want to give you spoilers!
The investigation happened during dinner. There had been this strange at-mosphere, a tension unlike any other, for everyone knew that the killer was amongst them… However, that did not stop them from enjoying all of the lovely food.
All tummies were filled, but that did not stop us from eating Laura Vo Ngoc’s carrot cake. And when there are jam-muffins, no one says no to that, right? Since our stomachs pretty much already exploded by then, we didn’t see any harm in taking some vanilla ice cream as well. I mean, what are the odds of two people dying in one night…?
However, gut feeling is telling me another murder will take place, some-time, somewhere, when you least expect it.
Rosa Zwaal, Class of 2017, is an Anthropology and Sociology major from Delft, the Netherlands.
Kim Smulders, Class of 2017, is a Pre-Med student from Deurne, the Netherlands.
