“No problem,” said Kim. Madeleine sat down, and Kim continued. “Kitchen knives started disappearing. One day I got home from a class and I couldn’t find my cat. Eventually I heard this little meow. The cat was in one of the closets with the door closed—a closet I never used. And there was one time I overslept because the time on my alarm clock had been changed.”

“Aggravating, but fairly harmless,” said Gurney. The look on Madeleine’s face suggested strong disagreement, so he added, “I don’t mean to downplay the emotional impact that nasty pranks can have. I’m just thinking about the legally actionable degrees of harassment.”

Kim nodded. “Right. Well, the ‘pranks’ got nastier. One night I got home late and there was a drop of blood on the bathroom floor—like the size of a dime. And one of my missing kitchen knives was lying next to it.”

“My God,” said Madeleine.

“A few nights later, I started hearing these eerie sounds. Something would wake me up—I wasn’t sure what—and then I’d hear a board creaking, then nothing, then something that sounded like breathing, then nothing.”

Madeleine looked horrified.

“This is an apartment?” asked Gurney.

“It’s a small house, divided into one upstairs and one downstairs apartment, plus a basement. There are a lot of crummy houses like it outside the campus, broken up into cheap apartments for students. Right now I’m the only tenant.”

“You’re alone there?” said Madeleine, wide-eyed. “You’re a lot braver than I am. I’d get out of there so fast—”

There was a flash of anger in Kim’s eyes. “I’m not running away from that little jerk!”

“You’ve reported these incidents to the police?”

She uttered a bitter little laugh. “Sure. The blood, the knife, the sounds in the night. The cops come to the house, they poke around, they check the windows, they look bored to death. When I call and give them my name and address, I can picture them rolling their eyes. It’s pretty clear they think I’m a paranoid pain in the ass. An attention seeker. The crazy little bitch with the exaggerated boyfriend problems.”

“I assume you’ve had the locks changed?” said Gurney mildly.

“Twice. It hasn’t made any difference.”

“You think Robby Meese is responsible for all this … intimidation?”

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“If you heard his voice—the calls he made to me after I threw him out? Or saw the looks on his face when we’d pass each other on campus? Then you’d know. It was the same weirdness. I don’t know how to explain it, but the stuff that’s been happening? It’s creepy, the same way Robby is creepy.”