It's The Roof, The Roof, The Roof

So now it's Saturday and The Smell persists. It's a million degrees outside, a horrible heat wave, and still we haven't been able to sleep in our bedroom, too afraid to shut the window and too afraid to put back in the air conditioner in case an inspector of some sort comes and wants to take it out.

But first, there is the patch test results. One by one we peel off the patches, and The Husband brings them to me to sniff, in another room, with my clean nostril palate. They all smell like musty room... until voila, one of them has The Smell. It's the one on the western wall, where there is nothing but brick on the other side. It tells me nothing, but now I am laser focused on that wall.

Back to the roof. We lean over and try to peer down the wall. We consider the long jump, one floor down to the roof of the building next door. Then I notice that the corner building, the one with a restaurant in the ground floor, also provides access to the roof between us. And I know the restaurant owner. He will surely bring us up to his roof. So off we go.

And, as luck would have it, just as we go by the neighboring building that we are trying to get to, someone with cleaning supplies exits. The Husband stops him and asks if he's the super. No, but the super is right there, on the stoop, where is always is.

And then we get the answer. We ask the super if we can look at his roof. He says, "sure, and we just did a whole bunch of work up there last week." Last week! That's exactly it. What has changed in the last week? The neighboring roof has changed. Up we go.

And there it is, the outside wall to our bedroom, slathered in roofing tar. You know that black tar that never seems to dry? That smells really bad, that smells like The Smell? It has been applied to the wall to seal cracks between the two buildings. Our 109 year old brick wall that is full of cracks and holes, guarded only by who knows how old cracked plaster, broken baseboards and 109 year old wooden floors that you can look though to see into the apartment below (before they put in the insulation).

Mystery solved.