Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

thought …”
    “Don’t think.”
    She sighed and then looked at me harder. She nodded to herself.
    “What?” I asked.
    “I suppose you could, with great care and guidance, someday find the right man to marry, a man who might be able to be work in our corporation. But,” she added, shaking her head, “I have grave doubts about your taste when it comes to the opposite sex. I see how infatuated you are with Kent Pearson. Don’t deny it. He’ll be lucky to attend a state university and probably won’t have a head for business anyway, if he’s anything like his brother. Therefore, even if you have a boy, he might not have the wherewithal to inherit control of our empire.”
    “Empire?”

    “Don’t you see?” she cried. She actually pounded her own leg for emphasis, so hard it made me wince. “You can’t just go flouting about with anyone who pees standing up.”
    “What?” I started to smile.
    “Any boy, Semantha. You have to realize your responsibility to our heritage.”
    “What about you, Cassie? You might find the right man if I don’t.”
    She looked away for a long moment. I thought she might have nothing else to say.
    And then she whispered as if she were talking to herself, “I can’t possibly leave Daddy, especially now.”
    Before I could ask her what she meant, we heard Mother calling us in the hallway. I went to the door.
    “What, Mother?”
    “Your uncle Perry’s leaving, girls. I just showed him Asa’s nursery and some of the renovations.”
    I looked back at Cassie. “Uncle Perry’s leaving.”
    “I’m devastated. Go say good-bye for me,” she told me. Then she rose and went into her bathroom.
    Her whispered words seemed stuck in my ears:
“I can’t possibly leave Daddy, especially now.”
    I would hear them often in my mind.
    And I would struggle to understand them as if my life depended on it.
    Little did I know that it actually did.

Only the Beginning
    T HAT EVENING , I thought I was dreaming it, but I soon realized that Cassie was kneeling at my bedside and whispering in my left ear. I opened my eyes and continued to listen before I turned toward her. I wanted to be sure it wasn’t a dream, and I was terrified that it might be a ghost, one of the Heavenstones, of course, maybe even Asa Heavenstone, since his namesake was soon to be born. It wasn’t the first time I had thought I heard voices in this historic house. There were even times I had thought I had seen something ghostlike moving in the shadows.
    I turned slowly and saw Cassie in her nightgown.
    “She’s doing it again,” she whispered.
    “Who?”
    “Mother.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Crying, moaning, complaining. You’d have to be dead not to hear it. She’s walking the hallways, and Daddy is pleading with her to go back to bed.”
    I sat up and listened. I didn’t hear anything.
    “What do you mean, she’s doing it again? I don’t hear her,” I said.

    “She’s not doing it now. He got her to go back to their bedroom,” Cassie said. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you this would happen. She doesn’t have the temperament for all this, for having a new baby. She’s too much into herself, into her own life.”
    “How can a mother be too much into herself to have her own baby?”
    “You really are so naive, Semantha, especially for someone your age. You ever wonder why our mother hasn’t ever been involved in Daddy’s business? She hardly visits one of our stores. You know why he really never talks about business at dinner? He knows she’s not in the slightest interested. Haven’t you noticed how much of an introvert she’s become?”
    “What’s that? I’m not sure,” I admitted.
    “Christmas trees, Semantha. You’re in the ninth grade. If you’d read more, you’d have a decent vocabulary.”
    “I read.”
    “It means she won’t belong to any club or go shopping with friends and always gives Daddy a hard time about going to social events. She’s happy just doing her housework and her jigsaw puzzles. Why do you think she has so few personal phone calls? She’ll never call anyone back. She’d rather be by herself than with anyone else, even Daddy.”
    So that’s what it means, I thought. Of all people to call someone else an introvert, Cassie shouldn’t. She could easily be describing herself, not Mother.
    “Daddy doesn’t seem unhappy with her,” I offered.
    She stood up, towering over me now. In thedistorted shadows carved by a half-moon glowing through my