Masquerade (25 page)

Chapter 28

The girls were bathed, in their pajamas, and watching TV in Slade’s room when he finally came back. He looked tired, and his hair was mussed, like he’d run his hands through it repeatedly. Without saying a word, he collapsed on the couch, leaned his head back until it touched the wall, and stared at the ceiling.

Clarissa sat next to him so they could talk. “Did the restaurant manager accept your check?”

“They’re going to take account of everything and send me a bill.”

Clarissa nodded
. Neither of them said anything for a moment. “I think your big mistake,” Clarissa finally said, “was letting go of Bella’s hand to help Natalie wipe off her dress.”

Slade dropped his gaze from the ceiling an
d looked at Clarissa. “How was I supposed to know Bella would run off crying underneath the salad bar table?”

“Experience.”

“You’d think they’d use a sturdier table for all of that salad stuff.”

Clarissa shook her head sadly. “It probably would have held up fine if I hadn’t crawled under there to retrieve Bella. But, you know, I
was so worried she would bump it and send everything crashing to the floor.”

“Yes, well, that’s irony for you.” The beginning of a smile
tugged at the comers of Slade’s mouth. “How is your head doing now?”

“Don’t smirk at me
,” she said. “I’d like to see you wrestle with a five-year-old under a table and see if you can keep it from toppling over.”

“She’s only four,” he said.

“She’s nearly five, and she’s as strong as a wildcat.” Clarissa ran her hand over the top of her head, where a small bump had formed from ramming it into the underside of the table. It still hurt. “Besides, my head is the least of my wounds.”

His eyebrow quirked upward.
“Did you get other injuries when the seafood platter fell on you?”

“I’m talking about my pride,” she said. “I w
as covered with cocktail sauce—and by the way, I noticed you didn’t jump over to wipe off my clothes like you did Natalie’s.”

“I was holding onto Bella,” he said and then added, “besides, the way you were hopping around, I would have been hard pressed to catch you, let alone wipe off anything.”

Clarissa tilted her head and gave him an aloof stare. “You would have jumped around, too, if you’d gotten shrimp down your shirt.”

The smile was back on Slade’s lips, but he tried to suppress it. “It
’s not like it was alive.”

“
Exactly. It was dead fish, and it was sliding down my back and stuck in my bra.” She gave an involuntary shiver. “I’ll probably smell like a wharf for days.”

He reached out and patted her hand as though she were a child. “Well, it’s over now, and if the restaurant staff works hard, I’m sure they’ll have the place clea
ned up by the breakfast shift.”

Clarissa glanced over to where Bella and Elaina lay
watching TV. “At least the girls don’t seem any worse for the trauma. Although I think I’ll always remember the sight of Elaina standing there crying in the middle of the Jell-O salad remains.” Clarissa shook her head again. “Poor thing. I think all the people screaming frightened her.”

“It’s amazing what will make people scream,” Slade
agreed. “Most of them only got a little splattered when the table tipped over.”

“Except for that one lady,” Clarissa said with a wince. “She got the full brunt of the potato salad.”

Slade looked back at the ceiling and sighed. “You know, about the time the condiments went up in the air, I started having flashbacks to the whole Evelyn-and-Brad-Nash affair.” He ran both hands through his hair as if to shake off the memory. “Man, I hope no one had a camera going. That’s all I need—another restaurant scandal.”

Clarissa
felt a wave of sympathy for Slade and reached over and rested her hand on top of his. “Did it ruin your deal with AJ?”

“No, that was ruined before Bella even walked into the restaurant. Which, of course, now seems like a blessing since it saves me the humiliation of being officially banned from all of
AJ’s sets.”

“But none of the mess was really your fault,” Clarissa said. “Surely
AJ won’t hold it against you.”

Slade
let out grumbling noise of disagreement. “I still haven’t lived down the tropical fish fiasco from
Mermaid Island
.”

“Oh? What happened there?”

“A Tonka truck and a fifteen-hundred-gallon aquarium. Suffice it to say, at that point I began encouraging Bella to play with Barbie dolls, because no matter how hard you throw one of them, it won’t break glass.”

Now Clarissa smiled and tried to hide it.

Slade sighed again and rested his head back against the wall. “What am I going to do with Bella?”

Clarissa glanced at Bella and then back at Slade. “Was that a rhetorical question, or do you really want my opinion?”

He leaned toward Clarissa and lowered his voice. “If Bella really is doing this on purpose, I need to know how to help her.”

It wasn’t something Clarissa had thought about in clinical terms, and yet she knew exactly
how Bella felt. She knew it because she felt it herself. She knew it because she’d seen the shadows of the same emotions flicker around her own daughter. Now she struggled to explain it to Slade.

“I don’t think Bella necessarily plans it. She’s just frightened and angry. She lost control of her world, so she’s trying to control what’s left of it the only way she knows how. With every scrape she gets into, she gets more attention and love from you.”

“I wasn’t very loving to her tonight,” he said.

“Well, you weren’t when you were barking out new rules. And by the way, I don’t think she even heard rule
twenty-two or twenty-three; but after that, you held her in your arms like you always do. That’s what she wants. I might rip off a tablecloth or down Miracle Grow if I knew it would get me more love.”

“So I’m supposed to comfort her less?”

“Less after her accidents and more beforehand. Reward good behavior positively and enforce consequences for negative behavior.”

He didn’t say anything. S
he went on anyway. “And be grateful Bella still wants love. Some people cope with divorce by turning off their emotions altogether. They refuse to open up or trust anyone because they don’t want to be hurt again. It’s easy to turn off the trust. It’s harder to turn off the anger. That stays with you.” Clarissa suddenly stopped because she realized she was talking about herself and didn’t want Slade to realize it too.

Perhaps he already did. He was looking at her intently, as though trying to figure something out.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I’d better go back to my room and take a shower—you know, make sure I’m rid of the dead-fish smell.”

“Wait a minute.” He turned toward the girls
. “Bella, come here.”

Bella got up and
trotted over to him.

“I’ve been thinking
,” he told his daughter. “And I’ve decided we ought to go downstairs and help clean up in the restaurant.”

Bella frowned.
“But I’m not allowed to touch broken glass, Daddy. It’s rule number fourteen.”

“We’ll clean something besides the glass,” he said.

Her brows furrowed together and she glanced back at the TV. “I want to stay here with ‘Laina.”

Slade
took hold of her chin and turned her face so she looked at him again. “When you made that big mess, you made a lot of people unhappy. Now we’ve got to set it right.”

The brows were still furrowed
. She pulled away from Slade and stared silently at the floor.

“The restaurant manager was sad that so many of his things got broken,” Slade went on, “and the people who got showered with salad were sad
too. Clarissa got a bump on her head. I think that made her very sad.”

Bella’s lip
quivered, then the tears came. Instead of throwing her arms around her father, she went and pressed her face into Clarissa’s side. “I’m sorry I ran under the table!”

Clarissa picked her up, held her close, and rubbed the little girl’s back while she sobbed.
Clarissa suddenly understood Slade’s dilemma much better. It took everything she had not to completely absolve Bella of wrongdoing. “I still love you,” Clarissa said. “I just hope next time you’ll make a better choice.”

Bella took a shaky breath and nodded. With her arms around Clarissa’s neck she said, “Are you going away?”

“No,” Clarissa said, “of course not.”

“Not even if I’m naughty?”

“You’ve already been naughty,” Clarissa said, “and I’m still here.”

Bella seemed to consider this. “Then will you take me to kindergarten when I’m big enough?”

Clarissa smiled at the odd request. “If that’s what you and your daddy want.” She looked over at Slade, expecting he’d be smiling or wearing a puzzled expression. Instead, his features were stern and pained.

So perhaps she had overstepped her bounds. Perhaps Slade didn’t expect she would still be working for him by the time Bella went to kindergarten.

Clarissa held Bella for another minute and then reluctantly gave her to Slade. He put her on her feet, keeping hold of her hand. “Let’s go down to the restaurant and see what we can do.”

She nodded, and then the two of them left the room, hand in hand.

* * *

The next
morning Slade called Clarissa and said he’d decided to spend the day alone with Bella. “I figure we could use some more father-daughter time.”

Clarissa commended him and said she hoped they’d have a good time and then felt sorry for herself. It was their last full day in Hawaii, and she would spend it without Slade.

She and Elaina went for a walk along the beach, went to the pool, had lunch, then went back to their hotel room. While Elaina took a nap, Clarissa straightened up the room, repacking what she could. Then, because she decided she should do something educational with her daughter, Clarissa used the hotel stationery to cut out the letters of Elaina’s name. When Elaina woke up, Clarissa would give them to her to color. She was trimming the top of the letter L when a knock came at the door.

She
opened it and found Meredith there, her cell phone in hand. “Is Slade with you?”

“No, he decided to spend the day
with Bella.”

Meredith walked into the room and sat down on the couch dejectedly. “I
can’t get a hold of him, and I just had a call from Kim. She’s in Mexico.”

Clarissa picked up the scissors and started on an N. “In Mexico? Why?”

“There was an algae bloom off the gulf. She went to examine it.”

“Oh,” Clarissa could muster only mild disappointment. “Slade won’t be happy about that.”

“Well, he’s going to look like a fool in front of Natalie and the
Undercover Agents
cast. I mean what sort of weak excuse is that? My girlfriend had an emergency come up—she had to study an algae bloom.” And then Meredith eyed Clarissa with a peculiar expression.

“What?” Clarissa asked.

“I’ll watch the girls tonight so you can go as Kim.”

“What?” Clarissa said again.

“You’ll be in a Cat Woman costume. No one will even know it’s you.”

“Well, not unless I also pretend I’m mute.
They have heard my voice.”

“You could fake an English accent, couldn’t you?”

Clarissa shook her head. “It would never work.”

“Why not?” Meredith said.

Clarissa eyed her, trying to tell how serious she was.
“I don’t know why not. I just know it won’t. Besides, Slade wouldn’t want me to try a stunt like that. He can come up with an excuse—make up a dying relative or something.”

Meredith sighed and seemed to concede the point. “I suppose you’re right
. I just hate to think of Natalie Granger being smug about the whole thing.” Meredith stood up then, her visit finished. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Slade has lived down worse things. Last night’s dinner, for example.”

Meredith moved to the door and then as an
afterthought said, “You’ve told your husband we’re coming home early, right?”

“
Yes,” Clarissa said.

“Good. I got the impression he was feeling neglected when he called.”

Clarissa felt, very quickly, that her blood had all dropped to her feet. “He called?”

“Oh, that’s right
, I never told you. He called your room the night when you were at the pool. I was in your room getting Elaina’s stuffed dog.”

He called? How did he get
the hotel’s phone number? He didn’t even know where she was. And then with a sudden rush of dread, Clarissa realized he did. She had sent that information to Renea by e-mail, and Renea had undoubtedly given it to her brother. It would have been easy for him to look up the phone number of the Mahalo Regency Resort.