Death of the Toad

by William McMurray

CHAPTER TWO

  The next day Janet awoke to the aroma of pancakes and bacon cooking below. Her landlady from her student days at college, Mrs. Kay McKay, had started preparations for breakfast. Janet hurried down to the kitchen of the ancient McKay home.

  Since her husband's early demise Kay had supported herself with a variety of jobs around the University campus. Latterly, a substantial inheritance had made her independent financially but she obtained help with the household expenses by taking in selected boarders. Over the many years of their association Kay had adopted the role of in loco parentis to Janet.

  "I hope the, events at the Pinkney house yesterday didn't upset you too much," said Kay as she served the meal.

  "Well," Janet responded hesitantly, "I did have a rather unpleasant reunion with Jeremy. Isn’t there anyone with some regrets about his father's death? Jerry couldn’t stand him, Professor Antwhistle holds him in contempt, no-one seems to have a good word to say about him!"

  "You won't find too many fans in the Department of Chemistry either. Not long after my husband died I became a junior secretary in the Chemistry Department. Of course Josh Pinkney was a pretty junior faculty member then too so he wound up with incompetent typing at first!"

  Hardly incompetent for long, thought Janet. As for everything else that she managed, Katherine McKay would have quickly mastered typing, even in the abstruse lingo of the chemists.

  "What was he like back then?"

  "I barely knew him, as a person. He had a surface that I never penetrated; nor did many others that I could tell. But very diligent. I suppose I typed up more than a dozen manuscripts for him, and I stayed less than a year. It's not unheard of for chemists to generate so many articles, though it was said that some of his manuscripts were rather repetitious”.

  "Potboilers," Janet put in.

  "Yes. He seemed in a hurry to show himself as a striver.

  Always making extravagant proposals to granting agencies,

  foundations, the armed forces, to raise research money, contract

  work, outside consulting positions - I would guess he spent

  twice as much time on that and travelling on various mysterious

  junkets than he did in the lab and classroom combined. I

  exerted a good deal of my energy trying to cover for him at

  first. I left you know - he didn't fire me."

  Janet considered the patrician face of her landlady. Like

  Janet herself Kay was sturdy both in her physique and mental

  outlook. It was indeed difficult to conceive of anyone firing

  Kay McKay, or taking advantage of her in any way at all; she was

  the very model for the term “feisty” years before it had come

  into popular usage. She ran her boarding arrangements with

  well-defined rules about the use of the house, tempered by

  benevolent concern for her "paying guests". Meals for the

  boarders for example, were generally self-serve. But occasionally, and unpredictably, Kay would produce a generous breakfast that had two notable purposes: it made up for the self-imposed nutritional deficiencies of her busy professional girls, and it provided a golden opportunity to catch up on the choice items of contemporary gossip around town and campus. Since Janet was now the sole paying guest in residence most of their present conversation centered about university affairs and at the moment, naturally, around the events at "Toad Hall".