Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

and she was looking up. They seemed to glaze over as I watched. Her mouth opened just a little more, and I thought I heard her whisper, “He loves me.”
    In a panic, I hurried to my room to call Daddy. He was out of the office, but his secretary located him quickly for me and transferred me to his cell phone.
    “What is it, Semantha?” he asked. The tone of his voice had not softened when he spoke to me all these weeks, and it had that sharpness in it now as well.
    “It’s Cassie,” I said. “She’s fallen down the attic steps, and she’s hurt badly.”
    “What? Did you call for an ambulance?”

    “No, not yet.”
    “Okay. I’ll call,” he said, and hung up before I could tell him anything else.
    I returned to Cassie’s side. First, I picked up as many of the emptied pill capsules as I could find, and then I found the bottle itself. I put the capsules back into it and sat beside her, holding her hand. It grew cooler and cooler in mine. I don’t know how long I was sitting there with her until Daddy arrived. He came right behind the ambulance. The paramedics flew up the stairs behind him, and one of them lifted me out of the way gently.
    Daddy waited while the other checked Cassie and then looked up and shook his head.
    “Oh, my God, no! No!” Daddy screamed. “Not my Cassie! She can’t be dead! Give her CPR! Do something!”
    Whether they did it to calm him or they really believed it would help, I do not know, but they tried. The one who had helped me told Daddy they had to call the police. He barely nodded. Then he grabbed my left arm and pulled me toward my bedroom.
    “Tell me exactly what happened,” he said. “How could she fall down this stairway?”
    From the tone of his voice, I understood he was blaming me even before he heard anything. The day he had learned I was pregnant, he had swept me off the pedestal on which every father sees his daughter. I was the fallen angel who had cracked his shattered heart even more, and nothing I could do would ever mend it. Because of that, he would never have any trouble seeing me as being at fault or believing I wasthe cause of more trouble, more pain. Yes, I could be evil. I could lie. I could do illegal things. He wasn’t an objective parent. He had been moved from one who could never see or believe his child was evil to one who could see little else. Forever and ever, I would be guilty until proven innocent, and not the vice versa it was for almost all parents and their children.
    I sat at the foot of my bed and looked at the floor. He stood over me, breathing so hard I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I was almost too frightened to speak, and I was still crying.
    “Semantha,” he said.
    “It all started when I told her to stop wearing Mother’s things.”
    “What?”
    “She was always acting more like my mother than my sister.”
    “You’re not making any sense, Semantha. What’s that have to do with the stairway, the attic?”
    “I made her change her clothes, and then she went to your office, and I went to her room and began gathering up Mother’s things. I thought I would put them in the attic, in that armoire you said belonged to Grandmother Heavenstone. I put all the clothes in there.”
    We heard someone running up the stairway and turned toward the doorway.
    Uncle Perry appeared.
    “What happened, Teddy?” he asked, and looked down the hall where the paramedics remained beside Cassie’s body. We could hear one on his cell phone talking to the police.

    “I’m trying to find out.”
    I began crying harder.
    Daddy grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard. “Stop this and talk. Talk!”
    “Take it easy with her. This is a huge shock for her, too, Teddy,” Uncle Perry said.
    Daddy took his hands away. “You said you put your mother’s clothing into Grandmother Heavenstone’s armoire in the attic. So?”
    “Then I went back to Cassie’s room and got all of Mother’s jewelry to put in there as well. I opened the first drawer and I found this,” I said, opening my fist.
    Daddy hadn’t noticed that my fist had been closed the whole time.
    Uncle Perry moved closer to look.
    Daddy took the pill bottle out of my hand, looked at it and then at me.“What is this?”
    “That’s Mother’s sleeping pills,” I said.
    “So?”
    “Why were they up there?” Uncle Perry asked.
    Daddy looked at him. “Yes, what is this?”
    I took the pill bottle from him and opened it.“Hold your hand out, Daddy,” I said, and