A Window of Opportunity

Selia Stanton rolled over and opened one eye, just wide enough to see the clock beside her bed. It said 4:30 AM – the same time it had said the day before and the day before that and every day for the past two weeks. It didn’t seem to matter what time she went to bed – 4:30 was her new wake-up time, and she was learning to live with it.

She made a pot of coffee and sat down in her favorite chair – which recently she had placed in front of a large window in her living room. And looking out at the world before her, shrouded in darkness, she began to make up stories about what she could see.

Her current view of choice was a large loft apartment in the building directly across from and two stories above what she called her “window of opportunity.”

The apartment itself was a logical choice because it was always brightly lighted – 24/7.  Selia could see quite clearly into well-lit rooms. One was a gathering room right off the front entry. One was a dining room, and another was an office or workroom. There was also a room with a piano in it and some furnishings conducive, she thought, to meditation or yoga. And the last was a bedroom in which an ill or injured person apparently lived.

Nurses arrived at the front door in three, eight-hour shifts every day. Weather permitting, the seven-to-three shift nurse often parked whoever lived in that corner bedroom outside on a small balcony in a wheelchair for several hours after lunch. The outdoor air and a change of scenery must be nice for the patient, Selia thought. She had never seen a face on the person in the wheelchair, so she didn’t know if it was a man or a woman.

To make her game of intense observation more interesting, Selia had made an effort to learn a few facts about the apartment and its resident. A realtor friend had researched the public records, revealing a few facts about the unit itself. It filled the whole fifth floor of the luxury condominium building at 511 Whitney Avenue in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. 

The condominium apartment that interested Selia had eight rooms, covered 2,500 square feet of living space, and was owned by a Mr. Geoffrey Witherspoon.

Selia then Googled all the Geoffrey Witherspoons living in the Denver area. There were six listed – a banker, an artist, an author, a stockbroker, a minister, and an engineer. Those six interesting Geoffrey Witherspoons ranged in age from 35 to 96, and each had made at least one major contribution to the betterment of society at large. Further research indicated that hers was Geoffrey Witherspoon, the author, 45 years of age, and very wealthy.

Now, it was time for Selia to make practical use of her “window of opportunity.”  She, too, was an author – or hoped to be. Her first book was right now in the hands of a publisher, and while she waited for answers, she planned to use the scene unfolding in front of her as the stage for her next novel. She would create a Geoffrey Witherspoon of her own design, based loosely on the facts that her research provided and give him a fascinating life.

“He’s ‘Geoffrey with a ‘G,’ his father always said when introducing him as a little boy, and Geoffrey called himself that until he was old enough to know better. 

He’d had an awkward childhood, or at least it felt awkward to him. His father was a United States Naval Officer, so “Geoffrey with a ‘G’ ” lived in seven different homes in three different countries, on two different continents before he was 12. His circumstances could have made him socially handicapped, but they hadn’t. He was a gregarious man, always reaching out to help others both professionally and personally, especially young, ambitious people. He was a good conversationalist, popular with his peers, and multi-talented. In other words, a perfect leading male character in perpetual search of his perfect leading lady.

Because Geoffrey hadn’t lived very long in any one place as a child, and he hadn’t had much opportunity to make real friends (so like Selia), he made up stories to entertain himself. He got to be very good at it, and now, at 45, he was a best-selling author. He specialized in “Society Murder Mysteries.” 

His title characters mimicked his own childhood name – “Jerard with a ‘J’ ” was his first book to make the New York Times Best Seller List.  “Eugene with an ‘E’ ” came next, followed by “ Xander with an ‘X.’” Currently, there were 24 Geoffrey Witherspoon mystery novels on the market. 

He kept up an avid readership by deliberately writing the title character as the victim in some books and the perpetrator of the crime in others. That literary ploy left his reader’s guessing until an actual corpse appeared somewhere around page 317, revealing exactly who was the good boy in that intriguing mystery and who was the bad one.

Geoffrey lived in the Whitney Avenue apartment alone, except for the unidentified invalid in the corner bedroom. Selia never saw Geoffrey enter the sickroom, at least not when she was watching, which was usually at 4:30 AM and again after she finished her own 8-hour work shift at 3:30 PM. 

If you asked Selia what she did for a living, she would tell you that she was a “yet-to-be-discovered novelist,” but in her current reality, she was a private duty nurse for an elderly opera singer, now retired and bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. It was a good job, and Selia appreciated it because it paid well, and it left her time to do what she did best: create imaginary people doing fascinating things.

Obviously, Selia’s “Geoffrey with a ‘G’” slept in one of the rooms she couldn’t see, but he worked at all sorts of strange times in the office-workroom she could see. He spent hours sitting at his computer, typing vigorously and running his fingers through his rather nice-looking hair. Every now and then, he moved to a drawing table. She assumed he illustrated his own books, but she couldn’t see what he was drawing. So the next day, on her way home from work, she bought a pair of high-powered binoculars to help her gather more details.

Her writing teacher taught her to describe places with which she was personally familiar to create the scenery in her novels. So as she “observed” the workings of Geoffrey’s life (she clearly resisted the thought of spying), she recorded not only how he spent his time but where and when.

, One of her favorite of his spaces was the room he used as both a music room and a meditation room. 

He played his beautiful, glossy black grand piano with enthusiasm some days, more contemplatively on others, often for several hours at a time. When she watched him through the lenses of her binoculars, he seemed to be in some faraway place in his mind as he played. His face was really quite beautiful.

Some days he sat on the floor on a rug or a mat; she couldn’t quite see which, back razor straight, arms loosely at his side. She supposed he was meditating. As long as he was still, she seemed to become still as well and often left those sessions watching Geoffrey in time-out, surprisingly at peace herself.

Selia bought and read three of his books – Lloyd with a double ‘L,‘ Aaron with a double ‘A’ and Fillippe with an ‘F.’ The novels were set in London, New York, and Paris respectively. 

Aaron was a murderer. Both Lloyd and Fillippe were victims. Aaron murdered his victim by electrocution in a swimming pool. Lloyd was poisoned with salmonella, carefully grown in his serial killer’s basement laboratory, and then secretly spread on Lloyd’s ham sandwich. Filippe was run over by a deliberately drugged driver in a Peugeot on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Selia was impressed by his clever plot and interesting writing style. In fact, if she wasn’t fiercely in control of her own emotions (a good novelist has to be), she would have feared she was in love with Geoffrey by the time she finished Aaron with two ‘A’s. Some days, she literally raced to her chair and her “window of opportunity” when she got home from work to make sure Geoffrey was well and healthy and behaving in new ways that would provide her with more grist for her writer’s mill.

The day the elderly gentleman with a shock of curly white hair was rolled into Geoffrey’s music room, apparently to share a coffee and listen to Geoffrey play his piano, was a big day for Selia. She watched them greet each other with great affection through her binoculars. Was this man Geoffrey’s father, older brother, mentor, lover? She ran through all those scenarios and finally settled on “muse.” He was Geoffrey’s muse, perhaps the one who suggested the salmonella as a murder weapon in Lloyd with two ‘Ls.’ Maybe he also provided Geoffrey with descriptions of the lush scenery in both Paris and New York. Selia fell a little bit in love with him, too, as she fantasized about how very important he was to Geoffrey’s considerable success (and ultimately to hers.).

When the letter came from the publisher to who was reviewing her first novel, she opened it with shaking hands. It wasn’t an offer to publish exactly. Still, it did convey interest on the part of the publisher, and he invited her to an appointment in his office to have her book professionally critiqued. The appointment was for 5:00 PM the following Wednesday.

Selia dressed carefully. She imagined what a successful female author would wear, and she chose a slate grey suit, a crisp white blouse with a tailored collar made of Belgian lace. For accessories, she added grey leather shoes and a matching handbag. A small diamond stud pin in the shape of an open book gave just a hint of bling on the collar of her suit. Silver button earrings about the size of a nickel and a wide silver cuff bracelet completed her outfit.

Just before she left for her appointment, she stood before her “window of opportunity,” willing Geoffrey to appear for good luck, and he did, but not in his apartment. Instead, he stepped out of the front door of the building and onto the sidewalk, hailed a cab, and drove off. 

Her last thought of Geoffrey as she rode the elevator in her building to the basement parking garage was, “Well, I wouldn’t have been able to watch him today anyway, so I won’t miss a thing.”

Selia sat with her ankles neatly crossed, fidgeting only slightly in the publisher’s waiting room. To keep herself busy, she observed the competent moves of his private secretary, making mental notes of how she held the telephone, spoke to a new arrival, drank her coffee, and then spoke in modular tones into her intercom.

Abruptly the secretary stood and signaled Selia to follow her, saying, “Your book critic will see you now, Miss Stanton.” She led the way down a long corridor to an office with a glass front door.

Selia’s breath caught in her throat as she caught sight through the glass of the man behind the desk, and she thought she might actually faint when he rose to open the door, extending his hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Stanton,” he said. “My name is Geoffrey Witherspoon.” I’ll be your book critic today.

She hesitated for just a split second. “It’s Selia, well, Secelia really,” she purred as she laid her hand in his. “That’s - Seselia with an “S.”