Accidental Evil by Ike Hamill Page B

warning that it wouldn’t be satisfied with a liquid dinner.
    Peg pushed upright and opened the draw where she kept her menus. Fanned out on the counter, they were a sad lot. The middle of Kingston Lakes was pretty, but it didn’t offer a ton of options for take out dining.
    She could choose from a wide variety of pizza, subs, or fried seafood. One place even offered fried seafood on a sub. With a frustrated grunt, she swept the menus back into the drawer.  
    There were two major things that Peg wouldn’t bend on. First, she was particular about her bathroom. When she lived with someone there had to be one bathroom that was hers alone. Growing up with seven siblings, most of them brothers, she refused to lift the toilet lid to discover someone else’s mess.  
    She had a second bathroom-related rule—the bathroom had to be at least seventy-five degrees, year round. In the New Jersey farmhouse where she had grown up, the bathroom was tacked on to the side of the living room, and it had barely been insulated. The only reason the pipes didn’t constantly freeze was because the bare copper ran directly next to the wood stove. Even the toilet water would steam in the winter time.  
    Peg’s private bathroom had electric heat, heat under the tile, and its own thermostat. One of her boyfriends had joked that she could bake a pie in there if the oven ever went on the fritz. She could take jokes. She couldn’t take a cold bathroom.
    Her other major rule regarded the variety of meals. At the farm, they had been served meat and potatoes every night except Friday. As an adult, Peg was careful to not repeat the same genre of meal more than once a week.  
    An idea began to form. She pictured thick slabs of roasted meat, a puffy cloud of mashed potatoes, and soft green beans that had clearly been liberated from a can. The whole thing would be smothered in heart-stopping gravy. It was the exact meal her mother would have made on a Wednesday evening in July. Peg hadn’t treated herself to that kind of home cooking in years. She could afford the calories—she had just burned off a ton trying to squirm underneath the giant Kirk Hilliard.
    And she knew just the place to get it.  
    Peg grabbed her keys and her wallet. She thought about calling in the order, but then decided that it might be nice to sit out on the bench and look at the sun setting over the lake while she waited for her take out to be prepared.  
    She smiled as she pulled the front door shut.
    The car was dirty. She assessed the mud as she circled around to the driver’s door. Maybe that was something else she could treat herself to. Tomorrow, when she went into town for groceries, she could stop at that gas station that had the fancy…
    Peg stopped and looked into the woods. She only had a couple of acres, but it was plenty enough for privacy with the thick woods around her house. The back of her property abutted the golf course, and they were the best neighbors she’d ever had. Although if an uninvited golfer was currently trudging through her woods, she might need to revisit that opinion.
    “Hello?” she called.
    She heard a whirring sound that she associated with a motor driving a telescoping lens on a camera. She turned to look for the origin of the sound, but she only saw trees.
    “If you’re taking pictures of me without my permission, I hope you enjoy lawsuits.”
    She heard the sound of high-speed fans, buzzing into top gear. Peg nodded to herself as she realized the likely cause. She turned back for her house and walked quickly to the door. Peg barely slowed as she crossed through her little living room. The shotgun was in its rack in the back of her hall closet. Peg popped it free from the hook and scooped a handful of shells from the shelf. At the door to the deck, she pushed open the sliding door with her elbow as she loaded the last shell.
    “Show yourself,” she whispered. From what she knew of those little helicopters, they didn’t like trees.