Cooper swept in a breath at the same moment Jamie saw the feet sticking out from behind the desk. He hurried around to the body.
“Is it Gwen? Is she okay? What’s wrong?” Jamie asked in quick succession.
“Call 9-1-1,” he ordered as he bent over the body. “Give them this address.”
“What is it?” Her fingers felt numb as she pulled out her cell. “Wait. I see it.” There was a notepad with the address printed on it.
“Yes, it’s Gwen. She’s unconscious. She may have fallen. I don’t know yet. I’m getting a thready pulse.”
“9-1-1,” the dispatch operator answered. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“This is Jamie Woodward. I’m at Gwendolyn Winkelman’s office and she’s unconscious on the floor with a weak pulse.” She gave the woman the address. “I’m here with Detective Cooper Haynes of the River Glen Police Department. We need an ambulance.”
“All right. One’s on its way. Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t.”
She walked around the desk, phone to her ear. Cooper was leaning over Gwen whose mouth was slack. There was dribble running down her chin. Had she had some kind of attack? Her words of warning swept through Jamie’s mind and she felt cold.
And then she saw a note page on the floor from the same slim pad on the desk. It read simply Sorry. Jamie recognized Gwen’s distinctive capital “S,” slightly separated from the other letters, from the note Gwen had written to herself after she’d met with Emma.
Sorry?
Cooper read the note and silently looked at Jamie.
What did Gwen have to be sorry for, and what did that mean? Jamie’s eyes moved to the overturned cup and spilled tea.
“You don’t think she . . .” Jamie couldn’t complete her thought.
“I wish that ambulance would get here.”
They waited in tense silence, and after what felt like an eternity, finally heard the woo-woo-woo-woo of the siren as the rescue vehicle neared.
They followed the ambulance to the hospital. Jamie texted Harley to tell her what was going on. Harley called her back, which was a surprise. After asking anxiously about Gwen, to which Jamie had said it did not look like foul play, Harley, relieved, told her that Teddy Ryerson had stopped by, looking for Jamie, apparently. “He left a card,” Harley said. Jamie cynically decided he was trying, as ever, to get her to invest with him. He didn’t come right out and suggest it; he was more subtle than that. But he was persistent.
“Oh, and he asked me to babysit next weekend while he and his sister go to a Halloween par—”
“What? No! Not on your life. Uh-uh,” Jamie cut her off. “Are you kidding? I can’t believe he would dare to ask that!”
“You tell him that, then. I didn’t want to, but he needs a sitter. Nobody’s going to want to go there with that killer out there.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Jamie said. “But you’re not going.”
“Jesus, Mom. I said I wasn’t!”
Stay safe. Those were Gwen’s words.
Cooper had ordered the crime scene team in to check out Gwen’s office. Maybe she’d had some kind of seizure or accident, but that note . . . He wasn’t taking any chances, and for that Jamie was glad.
It looked like everything was going as well as it could. Gwen’s condition was unchanged. Jamie was just getting to her feet from her seat in the ER when Cooper was called into the area where they’d taken Gwen, behind security doors.
Jamie was still standing when Cooper appeared twenty minutes later. His sober expression was an answer.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”
He said in a shattered voice, “She passed away about half an hour ago.”
“Oh, God. Oh my God.”
“They don’t know why yet,” Cooper added.
“She didn’t kill herself. She didn’t! She wouldn’t!” Jamie was adamant.
“No one’s saying that.”
Jamie heard the unspoken “yet.”
Cooper pulled her into his arms and pressed her face against his chest. She was shaking so badly, she thought she’d collapse if she didn’t hold on tight.
Jamie felt like she was having an out-of-body experience, much like she’d had awakening to her mother’s voice saying Come home. Only this time it was less shock and more pure misery. Gwen . . . gone . . .
Why?
“What’s she sorry about?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Cooper admitted. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
She wanted to say she needed to stay. She wanted to fight and rail and scream. But what was there to say, really?
They were halfway back when she said, “Can we go to your house?”
He looked at her through the gloom of the car. “You want to?”
“Yes.”
That was all that was said. From the moment Cooper shut the back door of the kitchen behind them, they were in each other’s arms. Jamie wanted to make love to him. Fiercely. And he seemed to feel the same way.
Their clothes were tossed on the floor in ripped-off pieces as they stumbled their way to the bedroom. And then she was on the bed, pulling him to her, wanting, needing the heat of him. They were kissing, wildly, all over each other. Her hands were in the bedcovers, gripping and twisting. Not a word was uttered. The only sounds were their breathing, the squeak of the bed frame, the hard beating of two hearts. Jamie hadn’t made love in years and she was drowning in desire. She practically clawed him to her and he answered by spreading her legs and thrusting inside her with a passion that drove them both. The rhythmic motion of lovemaking fed her soul. She was reaching, straining, focused on a point of need so great that when the climax came, it almost caught her by surprise. She cried out, digging her hands into his back, hugging him to her as hard as she could. Dimly she heard him groan as well, feeling the spasms of his own fulfillment, lost in her own world.
And then the tears
