Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

sister to her, tried to educate her about boys and sex, tried to guide and protect her. I feel just as betrayed as you do. Thank God Mother’s not here to see this.”
    The hot tears were streaming down my cheeks.
    And when Daddy said, “Yes, thank God. She would have killed herself over what Semantha has done for sure,” I turned and ran up the stairs. I threw myself onto my bed and started to cry, and then I stopped.
    A strange new feeling came over me. It was as if all the sadness turned hard and filled me with a new and more satisfying emotion.
    I was filled with hate, hate for my sister. All I could dream of that night was getting my revenge and getting Daddy to see the truth and love me again.

    Little did I know that the way to get all that accomplished lay waiting for me where it had been ever since Mother’s death.
    And in a real sense, it was as if Mother herself brought me to it.

Downfall
    W HEN I SAW Cassie’s Mrs. Chapman, my supposed midwife, I thought for sure that she was another phony like Dr. Samuels. First, she looked about as old as Grandmother Heavenstone had on the day she died, and second, she was more interested in seeing the house than she was in seeing me. Instead of asking questions about my pregnancy, she asked one question after another about paintings, vases, furniture and appliances. It was as if she was really a real-estate agent and not a midwife. If Cassie saw my skepticism, she ignored it.
    We didn’t go up to my bedroom for any examination. She felt my stomach and pulled a pressure cuff out of her satchel to take my blood pressure. Then she finally asked me questions about my pregnancy. When she started to recite what I should expect during the last weeks, I stopped her.
    “Cassie has given me things to read about that. I know all that,” I said petulantly. I was still suspicious of her. In the back of my mind, I harbored the thought that Cassie probably believed she could deliver the baby herself, anyway. That damn self-confidenceMother had so admired in her was showing its face constantly these days. Often, I found her reading her books on birthing. She told me she just wanted to be sure everything went all right. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was trying to experience what I was experiencing, imagining it so hard and so well that she would have labor pains when I did.
    For my part, I hoped she would. To my way of thinking, she deserved the pain more than I did, anyway. She should have been the one to throw up, not me. She should be the one waddling like some duck around the house, not me. And she should be the one gaining all this weight and looking like a stuffed hog, which was how I felt now. I hung a dress over my full-length mirror so I wouldn’t have to see myself every morning.
    “We’ll deliver the baby in my bedroom,” Cassie told Mrs. Chapman, and then she brought her upstairs to see the room, as if that mattered. “I want the baby born in my bed,” she whispered.
    Mrs. Chapman looked at her and shrugged at me.
    “A bed’s a bed,” she said.
    “Hardly,” Cassie told her. “Let’s go to my office now and discuss the finances.”
    I didn’t follow them. I returned to the living room to wait. Nearly twenty minutes later, Mrs. Chapman emerged and stopped by the door of the living room.
    “You’re getting close,” she said. “I’ll be by every other day about the same time. Your sister has my phone number. Do you have any questions?”
    “How many babies have you delivered?”

    “Oh, too many to count,” she said. “Now, mind your sister,” she added, and left.
    When Cassie returned to the living room, I told her I thought Mrs. Chapman was a phony.
    “Why do you say that?”
    “You call what she did an exam? I asked her how many babies she has delivered, and she gave me the dumb answer, too many to count.”
    “It’s probably true.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “Do you think I would risk Asa’s birth by bringing in a charlatan?”
    I looked away. I didn’t want to tell her what I really thought, but I was very close to doing it.
    “I don’t want to lose my baby,” she added.
    “Your baby? I’m the one having the baby.”
    “He will be my baby, Semantha. We’ve established that. I’m going to be a mother afterward, not you. You’ll be off being a teenager again, going to parties and dances, dating. I’ll be the one stuck in this house raising an infant.”
    “You want that. You made this happen because you want