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propped up the pillows behind her to read her dad’s letter. She was an only child and it had hit both of her parents really hard when she left for St John’s. It had hit them even harder when she told them recently that she wasn’t moving back. Neither of her parents liked New York, and they certainly didn’t trust it. She had been raised in a small town in northern California. Walking a dog on cement and living in a high-rise, fifty stories off the ground, not more than thirty feet across from your neighbor in the next building over, was about as foreign to them as living in an igloo. In fact, given the choice, her parents would probably pick the igloo. Her mother called two to three times a week just to make sure Chloe had not yet been robbed, raped, burgled, or pillaged in the big city, the den of three million thieves, rapists, burglars, and pillagers. And, of course, her father wrote his letters.
    Chloe tossed the rest of the mail on the nightstand on top of her Barbri bar review books and grabbedher glasses. She flipped over the envelope and frowned.
    The top of the envelope had been neatly sliced open. Her letter was gone.

6
    She sat straight up in bed, her skin cold. Prickly goose bumps raced up her arm and across the back of her neck, and her thoughts immediately went to Marvin. She stared uneasy at the ceiling above, as if the walls had eyes, and pulled the covers up and around her.
    Marvin was her strange neighbor who lived in the apartment directly above hers. An unemployed social recluse, he had lived in the building long before Chloe had moved in a few years ago, and she knew he was definitely odd. Everyone knew he was odd. Each morning he stood watch on the courtyard below from his living room window; his plaid robe open wide, the belt useless and dangling at his side, and his hairy, middle-aged belly exposed, as well as God-knows-what-else under the cover of the windowsill. Thank the Lord for that windowsill. His pudgy, crowded face was always covered with a carpet of gray and brown stubble, and he wore black plastic glasses over eyes that were set too close together. In one hand he always held a black coffee cup. In the other, well, Chloe just didn’t want to think about that.
    The rumor around the laundry room was that Marvin was unstable emotionally and lived off a government disability check and help from his elderly mother. Behind his back, the residents called him Norman and speculated about what had really happened to his mother, who had not been seen for some time. For years Chloe hadthought Marvin weird, but harmless. She would occasionally see him in the hallway or in the lobby, and he never smiled, but sort of grunted as he passed her.
    Two months back, though, she had made the unfortunate mistake of waving hello at Marvin in his morning perch as she headed through the courtyard to her car. That night he was waiting for her in the lobby, with her mail in hand. He had smiled a lopsided smile that revealed tiny yellow teeth, and then had mumbled something about how ‘the mailman must have mixed theirs up’ before he shuffled upstairs to spy on his fiefdom again from his living room.
    After that, the inept mailman had mixed up their mail at least three times, and Marvin had taken up a new hobby of watering plants in the lobby, conveniently, it seemed, whenever Chloe came home from class. She could feel his stare locked on her from his living room perch when she walked to her car in the morning, and then when she saw him in the lobby at night. His egghead would bob up and down like a cheap car ornament and she would feel his eyes roll over her. Lately, she had been using the laundry room at the back of the building to come and go.
    Two weeks ago she had started to get strange phone calls, where the caller hung up as soon as she picked up. When she replaced the receiver, the ceiling would creak above her as Marvin shuffled back and forth. Maybe that had been Marvin tonight on her machine –