Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

asleep for very long. I’d doze off and then wake up and be awake for long periods of time until I dozed off again. Anyone who’s been through so traumatic an event would say he or she wondered if it had all been a dream. Every once in a while, I’d listen hard for Cassie’s footsteps to confirm it had been a nightmare and nothing more, but those footsteps never came.

    When I woke after one of my short dozes, I saw Daddy sitting in the shadows carved by the moonlight flowing through my sheer cotton curtains. The sight of him sitting so still startled me. I sat up slowly.
    “Daddy?”
    “How are you?” he asked softly.
    “I’m okay. I have trouble sleeping.”
    “I don’t expect to sleep at all,” he said. “I’m sitting here wondering how I let all this get by me, wondering why I was so blind, deaf, and dumb. She always seemed so perfect to me, or maybe I wanted her to be perfect. I suppose most parents are blind to their children’s faults or want to be. It’s just that I always thought of myself as … wiser, I guess. I believed my own publicity.”
    “I should have told you more, talked to you more. It’s mostly my fault.”
    “No, hardly. I’m sure I would have found some excuses or ways to disregard whatever you said. When I lost your mother, I lost my clear eyes. But there’s something that frightens me even more as I sit here beside you and think, Semantha. I wonder if you know anything about it.”
    “What, Daddy?”
    “Cassie was so in charge, especially after your mother became pregnant. I remember how upset she was to learn it when we announced it at dinner. It comes back to me now. A lot comes back to me now. It’s as if I had videotaped this past year or so and can play back troubling moments, so I can’t help wondering …”

    “Wondering what?”
    He leaned toward me.“Did Cassie do anything to cause your mother to have the miscarriage?”
    His question didn’t surprise me, because somewhere deep inside myself, I had the same fear. I recalled how just recently, Cassie had warned me against taking anything for a headache or a backache, especially aspirin. She made the point of saying it causes bleeding, and she was, as Daddy said, taking care of Mother so often when Mother was pregnant.
    “I don’t know, Daddy. I know she very much wanted you to have your Asa. She talked about it all the time.”
    He nodded, but I knew that, like me, he didn’t really want to know.
    “I guess that’s something we’re not going to know and shouldn’t think about anymore. Not now, not after all this,” he said.
    “No.”
    “We both have a lot to forget.”
    He rose and stood there a moment. Then he leaned over to kiss me.
    “Try to get some sleep.”
    “You, too.”
    “Okay. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.” He paused near the door. “As soon as I can, I’ll take you to see Dr. Moffet. Let’s do something right.”
    “Okay, Daddy.”
    “It’s just you and me now,” he said. “But don’t be afraid, Semantha. I’ll be here for you. I promise. What happens to you happens to me.”

    He left, his words hanging in the air.
    And I thought, those were almost Cassie’s exact words, too.
    Only she would have added, “After all, we’re the Heavenstone sisters.”

Epilogue
    T HERE IS SOMETHING about the nature of unwitnessed accidents in homes that stirs suspicious minds. Perhaps it’s because the things that cause the accidents and deaths are apparently so common, so shared with everyone, that everyone hopes there’s another explanation. No one wants to know that the everyday things he or she does can be fatal if some mistake is made. We’re not on battlefields when we’re in our own homes.
    Or are we?
    Not every war has to have bullets and guns and bombs. The war that raged in our house was practically invisible. There were constant explosions in the air, in our minds, and in our very souls, but we didn’t see them or feel them or want to see them and feel them. After all, we had so much camouflage to rely on, such as our wealth, our fame, and our well-guarded privacy. Ironically, it was Mother who enabled all this by refusing to have servants—witnesses, in fact. And it was both Mother and Daddy who built an image of Cassie that put her so high up, making it impossible to see not only herweaknesses and faults but, most of all, perhaps, her desperation.
    She was so desperate for love that she would harm those she loved to put herself at the front of the line when