PROVIDENCE — Heather Jesus couldn’t wait for this Monday to come.

She was just under three months pregnant, and she had scheduled her first appointment to have her doctor look at her baby. She expected to have a sonogram Monday and see her child growing inside her for the first time.

“She was so happy. She had her first appointment on Monday,” said her cousin Helen Haworth.

But Jesus, 21, never got the chance to drive her Saturn from her 381 Plainfield St. apartment in Silver Lake to the doctor’s office.

Instead, firefighters combating a blaze in the third-story apartment early Thursday morning found her dead on her living room floor alongside her first cousin, 17-year-old Amanda Sousa.

The police are calling it a double murder and say they have not determined whether the pair were killed in the fire that destroyed Jesus’ apartment, or before it started.

Both women had lacerations, though the police will not say from what type of weapon.

“There were obvious injuries to the body that were caused prior to the fire being started,” said Maj. Stephen Campbell, chief of detectives.

The police have determined that the fire was set intentionally, to destroy evidence, Campbell said.

The fire was set using available materials in the apartment, and Campbell said it did not appear that an accelerant, such as gasoline, was used.

The medical examiner has completed the autopsies, and the results will be released Monday.

Sousa and Jesus’ mothers were sisters, and the family is devastated, according to family members.

“It’s horrible. They lost two in one shot,” said Alicia Haworth, a cousin of both victims.

Yesterday, Alicia Haworth and her sister Helen, stopped by the Plainfield Street apartment where they used to spend time with Heather.

“That was her bedroom, and that one there was her parlor. And that’s the kitchen,” Helen Haworth said, pointing to the blackened third-story windows.

There are five apartments on the second and third floors of the building, and the California Taco Shop occupies the first floor. Now, most windows and doors are covered with plywood. Insurance estimators and home-repair specialists have wedged their business cards in the door jambs.

“Considering the neighborhood, it was a pretty halfway decent apartment,” Helen Haworth said.

She remembered a time a few weeks ago when she had come to visit Heather, but some of the people Heather hung out with scared her. She left, quickly.

“I told her nine times to stop associating with the people she did. But she wouldn’t listen,” Helen Haworth said.

Amanda Sousa grew up in Providence and lived with her family on Valley Street. She had left high school, but she was intending to go back and get her general equivalency diploma.

Most of the time, she would just hang out, said her friend, Jeff DeLorenzo. DeLorenzo said he lived next to Amanda for six years, and for a time, he said the two were best friends.

“We’d go to my house and just sit there,” he said. “We’d go to the mall — when we both got paid, we’d go get sneakers. She loved her sneakers.”

Then, the two had a disagreement, and they didn’t speak for some time.

At around the same time, Heather learned she was pregnant; she quit her job as a dancer at the Sportsman’s Inn downtown and rekindled relationships with some family members that she’d lost touch with.

Amanda jumped at the chance to spend more time with her older cousin, Helen Haworth said. Over the last several months, the two could always be found at the Plainfield Street apartment.

“Amanda was over there constantly,” Helen Haworth said.

With the baby on the way, Jesus had been considering leaving Plainfield Street, and getting an apartment with her boyfriend, the father of her child, Helen Haworth said. But then more recently she had been talking about moving back in with her mother in Warwick.

Campbell said that the police have found and spoken with the boyfriend.

He said that they have intensively questioned and released two people in connection with the deaths; one came in voluntarily, the other was arrested on an unrelated outstanding warrant.

Campbell said that he does not believe the killings to be random. He said that he has every on-duty police officer in the city, FBI contacts, two prosecutors from the attorney general’s office, and state police liaisons checking into this crime, even when dealing with seemingly unrelated arrests.

“They were just nice girls,” Helen Haworth said. “They were good girls. They had more life to them,” Helen said.

“It shouldn’t have happened. They were so young. They were living their life.”

dbarbari@projo.com