The Heavenstone Secrets Read online

  THE HEAVENSTONE SECRETS

  V.C. Andrews® Books

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  If There Be Thorns

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  Delia’s Crossing

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  The Heavenstone Secrets

  My Sweet Audrina

  (does not belong to a series)

  THE

  HEAVENSTONE

  SECRETS

  V.C. ANDREWS®

  Pocket Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family

  worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete

  Virginia Andrews’ stories and to create additional novels, of

  which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are

  used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales

  or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by the Vanda General Partnership

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

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  First Pocket Books hardcover edition January 2010

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  Designed by Esther Paradelo

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5496-0

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6682-6 (ebook)

  THE

  HEAVENSTONE

  SECRETS

  Prologue

  LIKE MOST ANY other girl my age, I was afraid of the darkness when I was alone. I was afraid of mysterious sounds, curious shadows, and all the other assorted Halloween creatures that populate our nightmares. More important, perhaps, I was not afraid of admitting to those fears. It was comforting to know that so many others my age shared them with me and so few would deny it. But I did have one fear that I was ashamed to admit or reveal to my friends, or anyone, for that matter, and I did the best I could to hide it, even though, at times, that seemed impossible to do.

  I had always been afraid of my older sister, Cassie. As long as I can remember, Cassie made me tremble inside when she looked hard at me or came toward me quickly as someone angry might. There was nothing grotesque or immediately frightening about Cassie, either. Anyone who heard me say I was afraid of her would surely tilt his or her head and smile with some skepticism. But none of them was her younger sister, and none of them lived with her.

  Mother once told me that she thought Cassie, even though she was only about three at the time, deliberately caused me to fall off the diaper-changing table, which resulted in a fracture in my right leg. To this day, Cassie denies it and insists that Mother was just not watching me properly and had put me too close to the edge. Although Mother blamed her, she excused it with something called sibling rivalry. She even made it sound okay.

  “Until the day you were born, Cassie was the precious princess in the family, especially for your father, and then you came along and nudged her off the throne. It’s only natural that she would have been terribly jealous and disappointed, but smother your worries. Sisters grow out of such things as soon as they are confident about themselves,” Mother told me, and then ran her fingers through my long golden-brown hair, which she said was softer than silk. I could see the pleasure in her face, and I was happy that I could bring that look of pleasure into her speckled green-blue eyes simply by being me.

  Unfortunately, I would immediately wonder if she had felt that way about Cassie’s hair when she was my age. Cassie didn’t take as much pride in her hair as I did, and she certainly wouldn’t let Mother run her fingers through it that way anymore, if she ever had. She always hated Mother touching her and especially hated her hair being brushed or changed from how she wanted it. Still, I was afraid she would be envious of how much attention Mother or Daddy paid me, whether it was because of my hair or my clothes or some clever thing I had said.

  Maybe Mother could see that fear in my face. She leaned down to whisper, her lips tickling my earlobe, and added, “And you and I know, Semantha, that Cassie is the most self-confident girl her age for miles and miles and miles around us. She doesn’t have to be jealous of anyone anymore. There are few her age or even older who are as intelligent and as competent as Cassie. Cassie is a born leader. She’ll make us all very
proud someday. I’m sure of it.”

  There was always a lot of whispering going on in our house. Soft words flew through our rooms on butterfly wings. Our parents whispered to each other often, even if we were too far away to hear their exact words. However, Cassie was the champion whisperer. That was because whenever she wanted to impress me with something, she would whisper it. It was a way of stamping it Secret, just the way a letter or a package might be stamped Priority Mail.

  And there was no greater sin in Cassie’s Ten Commandments than her First Commandment: Thou shalt never reveal a secret, especially if it was a Cassie Secret.

  Over time, her other commandments would come raining down upon me as if from the lips of some deity. Eventually, I came to believe that Cassie had her own private religion, her own personal god. I watched her carefully in church and saw how her eyes would blaze with defiance whenever we were asked to speak directly to God. She wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t sing a hymn or chant a prayer. She wouldn’t even bow her head. Neither Mother nor Daddy ever seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t seem to care, and ours was a very religious community.

  We lived in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, because that was where Daddy’s ancestors had come to live when they left England. Our triple great-grandfather, as Cassie liked to call him, built the Gothic Revival mansion in which we lived. Daddy, being the oldest son, inherited it. He had one brother who was five years younger, Perry. He worked in the Heavenstone company, but he lived in Lexington. He was a bachelor and lived alone in a townhouse.

  Our house had ten rooms. Five were downstairs: the large living room with the original fieldstone fireplace with stone up to the ceiling, a large dining room with a grand teardrop chandelier that had been imported years ago from France, a kitchen that had been renovated five times to provide for more modern appliances, twice alone after Daddy and Mother married, a dark oak den that was our entertainment center, and Daddy’s home office with a library with leather-bound first editions. Behind his large desk, built from the same dark oak that was used to make the library shelves, were bay windows that looked south on our property, so he was never bothered by the direct sunlight. His office had a slate floor and an alcove that housed all the modern machinery any business office would have.

  There were ancestral portraits everywhere. Daddy’s favorite was of one of our triple great-grandfather’s son, Asa Heavenstone. Asa was a hero in the Civil War who was killed only a week before the war ended. His portrait with him wearing his Confederate uniform still hangs in the living room next to portraits of our great-cousins, -uncles, and -aunts, as well as Grandfather and Grandmother Heavenstone. The people in Kentucky weren’t all in favor of the Confederacy, so we had cousins who were in the Union Army as well—only none of their portraits were hung on our walls. Daddy told us his grandparents were always terrified that someday, the family would learn that one of those in the Union Army had killed Asa.

  Daddy has a large portrait of his father in the office, angled so that it always seems he’s looking down at him. I have often seen Daddy looking up at his father and nodding slightly, as if they had just had a serious conversation about the business. He often looked at Asa’s portrait the same way.

  Mother often said that if one of us had been a boy, she would have named him Asa. When Asa was killed, our triple great-grandfather went into a very deep depression from which he never recovered. Even though he had two other sons and a daughter, he never got over Asa’s death, because Asa was his oldest and his favorite. His own death was a deep, dark secret. Mother feels confident that he drank himself to death in this very house. She envisioned him spending hours looking up at Asa’s portrait as his heart continued to shatter. Maybe that great sadness was what Daddy felt when he looked up at the portrait. I thought he imagined himself in Asa’s father’s shoes and tried to feel what he might have felt.

  Many times, I have stood in front of Asa’s portrait, studying it for any possible resemblances to my father or myself and Cassie. Daddy had a similar beard, but other than that, I didn’t see much similarity. I could see some resemblances in our other relatives but none in him. Cassie says that was because Asa looked too much like his mother. She says his father loved him the most because he looked so much like his mother, “and after all, that was where his father’s romantic love had gone. Husbands favor the child who looks the most like their wives.”

  The Heavenstone family lost much of its land and wealth after the Civil War, but Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone restored much of it through the fortune he made with his general stores, which eventually became the Heavenstone Department Stores our family now owned. There are ten throughout the state, with an eleventh being developed in Lexington. There is a statue of Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone in the lobby of the first Heavenstone Department Store in Danville. His first two wives died, one of typhoid and one because of a heart defect, but his third wife outlived him.

  I knew all this because Daddy said learning our family history was more important than learning the history of our state and country.

  “What is a country if not for its families?” he emphasized. “And what is a family without children?”

  We weren’t expected to answer any of these questions. It used to be difficult to tell the difference between questions Daddy wanted us to answer and questions he wanted to ask and answer himself. Even questions about us weren’t necessarily the ones we were to answer, so his pausing for a moment after asking meant nothing.

  “Why are you not working harder and being as good a student as Cassie, Semantha? I’ll tell you why you’re not,” he would say before I had a chance to protest and tell him that I really was working hard at being a good student. It was just impossible for me to be as perfect as Cassie. I know I spent more time on my homework than she did. Whatever I would say wouldn’t matter anyway, I supposed. What Daddy believed was already, as Cassie would say with one of her dramatic gestures, “a fait accompli.”

  Because Cassie could frighten me, she could easily command and hold my attention. Besides, it was fascinating to watch her parade about with her mother-perfect posture and cast her deep and serious pronouncements at me, as would someone tossing flower petals while riding in a parade. Cassie was always either in a parade or on a stage, and I was always on the sidelines or in the audience.

  Many of those solemn declarations that she made were about being perfect for our parents.

  “We have to be better in every way than other children would normally be for their parents, Semantha. We’re a famous family here. We have a real history, a rich heritage. Few families do. There is no official royalty in America as there is in countries like England, but there is in the minds of Americans. What that means,” she quickly added, because she could see I didn’t understand her—she claimed my face was so easy to read that it could have a library card—“is that people still look way up to certain other people, people with a history like ours, and think of them as something special. We truly are something special, so you can’t be ordinary. It’s absolutely forbidden for any of us Heavenstones to be ordinary,” she emphasized, which was Cassie’s Second Commandment.

  “We have to say double the clever things other children would say. We have to make our parents laugh twice as much as other parents laugh. We have to give our parents twice as much love, too, especially our daddy, who has been handed down all this grand heritage.”

  “I give them all my love,” I said.

  “It’s not enough. You’re not enough, I’m not enough, as we are. We must … rise to the occasion. We must be like angels, so much like angels that Mother will swear she sees wings on us both. Daddy already sees them on me, as you know, and that’s not by accident.” She paused and turned to me as if she had just remembered she was speaking to me and not to herself. I would swear that the way she held her shoulders when she said that actually made me think I did see wings on her, too. “Are you listening?”

  I nodded emphatically, but the more Ca
ssie talked about being more than perfect for our parents, the more worried about failure I became. How can I be twice as much as I was? I wondered. I didn’t doubt that maybe Cassie could. She was so intelligent and clever and read far beyond what girls her age would or could read. She was far more mature than her classmates, too. However, I knew that her teachers weren’t all fond of that. Some complained that she was racing through her childhood too quickly. She should play more, enjoy more, they said.

  “Cassie is Cassie,” Daddy would reply, as if that explained everything.

  Sometimes, however, I thought Mother was really becoming more and more unhappy about Cassie, rather than taking double pleasure in her. Ironically, Cassie had a personality that resembled our mother’s more than mine did, and I was sure Mother saw things in her and about her that she didn’t necessarily like in or about herself.

  For one thing, Cassie was too quick to see and point out weaknesses and flaws in other people, and once she rendered a judgement about someone, she couldn’t be moved from it, even, as Daddy might say, with a bulldozer. I sensed he actually liked that about her. “Too many women are flighty,” he said. “Their minds are tied too tightly to their erratic emotions and go from high notes to low notes like some out-of-tune piano.”

  But Cassie was so particular, especially about her classmates, that she had no real friends, just casual acquaintances she tolerated. She wasn’t just a snob. She was “a snob’s snob.”

  Although Daddy didn’t come right out and say it, I was sure he thought Mother was a snob, too. Mother didn’t belong to any clubs or organizations, and whenever Daddy asked her why not, she always answered with a complaint about the other women. “They gossip too much,” or, “They are obsessed with the wrong priorities.” They were too materialistic or simple. She also said many of them were “vague.”

  What did she mean by that? I asked Cassie. Cassie would never refuse to answer a question. She liked being asked, and she liked my listening to her. She would widen her eyes and put her face so close to mine, I could see the tiny specks of green in her eyes. I was jealous of those specks. They were Mother’s specks.

  “When Mother looks at these vague women, she doesn’t see anyone. They are so vapid and empty she looks right through them. They simply don’t exist.”