The hammering continued through breakfast, through lunch, and into the evening. Eleanor tried reading, but she lost her place every few paragraphs. A glass in the kitchen cabinet tapped against another glass with every heavy impact. At one point she stepped outside, looked up at the balcony above the vacant unit, and discovered that the contractor's windows were covered with opaque plastic even though the weather was clear. She could not tell what they were doing, only that it was loud enough to make conversation impossible.
At eight that night the tools finally stopped. Eleanor stood in the resulting silence and realized her headache had spread into the back of her neck. On the counter, beside the medicine she took each evening, lay the afternoon tablet she had forgotten. The discovery embarrassed her almost as much as the noise angered her. She had spent decades reminding patients that people under stress needed routines; now her routine was breaking apart in her own kitchen.
She wrote the hours into her notebook, noting what James had heard and what Daniel had said. James brought out a small digital sound meter left from an old engineering project. The battery still worked. He placed it on the dresser and wrote down the readings during the next morning's drilling. He knew that a sound meter on its own did not prove a code violation, but it could establish what had happened when someone later claimed the work was quiet.
The following day, the heat stopped. By midmorning the radiators were cold, and a gray chill settled into the apartment. Outside it was thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Eleanor pulled on another cardigan and sat near the kitchen stove while James called Daniel. The boiler had supposedly failed, though no one had warned tenants that work was being performed on the heating system.
"I'll call a technician," Daniel promised. "I'm sorry."
"How many units are without heat?" James asked.
Daniel paused. "I need to check."
James went downstairs and discovered Mrs. Carter's radiators were warm. Mr. Patterson's were warm, too. The vacancy beside them had no occupants to complain, and the Washington unit alone seemed to have lost supply. He took a photograph of the thermostat and another of the radiator thermometer, then called Daniel again. This time Daniel sounded shaken.
"Someone turned the valve serving your line," he said. "I've opened it. You should feel heat soon."
"Who turned it?"
"I don't know."
The heat returned late that evening and stopped again after three in the morning. James found the valve closed once more before sunrise. Daniel opened it again, then quietly installed a simple tamper-evident marker with James watching. Both men understood that a strip of tape would not stop a determined person. It would, however, make it harder to say no one had touched the equipment.