Masquerade (27 page)

Chapter
31

Clarissa sat on a cheap plaid couch in the lobby of the Sunset Park Motel and changed her mind every thirty seconds as to whether she should stay or not.

It was ridiculous. The whole scheme was ridiculous, and the sooner she called it off the better. She needed to get up, walk out of the building, go back to her rental car, and find some service station where she could change back into normal clothes.

The lobby clock read 6:50. She still had ten minutes to escape. Or ten minutes to sit here while every passing person gawked at her.

Why couldn’t Kim have wanted to be something normal for Halloween? A surgeon or an Arabian princess, perhaps. But no, it had to be Cat Woman, and now Clarissa was stuck on a couch in a skintight leather and spandex outfit, looking like a hooker with an identity crisis.

The only saving grace of the whole thing was that none of the people who were now staring at her would ever recognize her again. Except for the holes around her eyes and lips, the costume covered every inch of her skin. And just to make the outfit complete, she had worn blood red lipstick and dark gray eyeshadow. When she had looked in the mirror earlier, she’d hardly recognized herself. Certainly no one else would.

Of course, that still didn’t mean she
would be able to pull off the whole charade. Clarissa had no idea how to act like a botanist, let alone an English one. Meredith had let Clarissa read Kim’s undeleted e-mails. There weren’t many of them, and they weren’t very informative. All Clarissa knew about Kim was that she was specializing in something called systematics and that she thought the inevitable extinction of a quarter of Hawaii’s natural plant species was a tragedy of epic proportion. She just had to hope Slade never actually brought up the subject of botany.

The English accent was another thing to worry about. As Clarissa sat tapping her cat claws
against the couch, she thought of British terms. In England elevators were lifts, apartments were flats, gas was petrol, policemen were bobbies, and flashlights were torches. Something on a car was a boot, and something else was a bonnet, although she couldn’t remember which was what. Probably none of these things would come up in the conversation anyway.

Why hadn’t she watched more of those educational British shows?

Clarissa looked up at the clock again. It read 6:54. If she got up right now and ran all the way to the parking lot, which she vaguely remembered was called a “car park” in England, she might make it to her rental without Slade seeing her. He would never know what she’d done. It still wasn’t too late.

Clarissa shifted on the couch but didn’t get up. For all the horrible images she had of the night, another image, a better one, kept replaying in her mind. In this scenario everything went fine. She and Slade had a wonderful time talking and dancing together. Then as Slade drove her back to her hotel, she asked him about his nanny. He hesitated for a
few seconds, then told her how much he cared about Clarissa. A look of longing filtered through his eyes, and he murmured, “If only . . .”

Then the moment of Clarissa’s bravery came. She said, “Slade, you once told me
that we all wear masks. Since then I’ve thought a lot about the masks I wear. Some are for politeness— but I have other masks—masks I use to protect myself.

“I have a self-reliant mask, so I won’t have to need anyone. I have a cynical mask, so I won’t have to trust anyone. And I have a victim mask that allows me to
wallow in self-pity, so I won’t have to move on with my life. Being with you makes me want to take the chance of unmasking myself.” Then she would reach up and peel off her mask.

In this fantasy scenario, her hair was still lush and beautiful after taking off her mask, not stuck to the back of her neck in a sweaty clump, as it undoubtedly would be. In the fantasy
, Slade always wore an expression of pleasant surprise.

In real life it might be very different.
Well, if she took off her mask at all.

She looked up at the clock
: 6:57. Maybe he’d be late. Maybe he was stuck in traffic somewhere, or lost, and wouldn’t show up. Maybe she still had hope for an escape.

And then she saw him walking through the lobby doors. Slade always had a powerful presence
. As he strode into the lobby dressed in black, a cape flowing behind him, Clarissa didn’t know whether to laugh or to gasp and stare. He strode over to her. “Kim?”

She stood. “You must be Slade
. Either that or the masked crusader has finally tracked me down.” The accent didn’t come out as well as she would have liked. She sounded like a nervous Eliza Doolittle, and now she was stuck with it.

He cocked his head, smiled at her, and said nothing.

“What?” she asked. “Are my ears on straight?”

“Yes, it’s just that
. . .” His smile grew. “You’re much . . . taller than I remember.”

“Well, I should hope so. I was only
ten when you last saw me.”

He looked her up and down, shaking his head. “You don’t look
ten anymore.”

No, she thought, now I look like a streetwalker with a p
ersonality disorder. She smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.”

He held his hand out to her. “Shall we go?”

“Let’s.” She took his arm, and they walked out of the lobby. Slade smiled all the way to his car. In fact, Clarissa couldn’t remember when she’d seen him so uncommonly happy.

During the car ride he asked her about her flight, the weather in S
heffield, and how she liked her motel. Then he said, “Tell me about what you’re doing here in Hawaii.”

“I’m
studying the plant life,” she said, tapping a claw against her knee.

“I’ve always found plants so fascinating,” he said. “What exactly is it you do?”

“Well . . .” she shrugged as though not even she found it interesting enough to talk about. “Basically, I gather plants and examine them under a microscope.”

“W
hat do you look for?”

That would have been a good thing to research before this date.
“Different things,” she said. “Cell structure. Disease. Photosynthesis. That sort of stuff.”

“Photosynthesis? You can see that happening under a microscope?”

Umm. Maybe not. She had no idea.

She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “
If you have the right type of microscope.” She should have brought her cell phone, she realized. If she’d brought a phone she could have faked some sort of emergency and insisted he take her back to the motel. She hadn’t brought it, though, because she didn’t have a place to put things, and she’d had the fear that Slade would call her—Clarissa—and grow suspicious when Kim’s phone suddenly went off. But now she was trapped in the car trying to remember the difference between chlorophyll and chloroform and hoping she didn’t have to use either of those words in the near future.

“I’ve never understood how photosynthesis works,”
Slade said. “Could you explain it?”

No, not really. She
glanced over at the dashboard and faked a gasp. Slade looked first at her and then at the dashboard. “What?”

She let out an exaggerated sigh. “
For a moment I thought we were out of petrol. And wouldn’t it be horrible to be stuck out here without even so much as a torch? Or what if we had some other car trouble? I mean, can you see us crawling around the boot or the bobbie dressed like this?”

“The
bobbie?” he asked.

“Bonnet,” she said. “I meant bonnet.”

He nodded. “Oh, right. Bonnet means hood in England, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s what I meant.” She cleared her throat again. “A
bobbie is a policeman. And I can tell you, there’s never a bobbie around when you need one, so it’s a good thing we have enough petrol.”

“You were telling me about photosynthesis,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t want me to talk about my work.” She turned slightly toward him. “Why don’t you tell me about your job? How have things been in Hawaii?”

H
e shook his head. “I pitched a script, and the producer rejected it.”

“I’m sorry.” And then because he didn’t say anything else she added, “What will you do with it now?”

“I don’t know. I’ve gone through about every producer I can think of.” He took his gaze from the road long enough to look at her. “What do you think I ought to do with it?”

“Could you produce it yourself?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Movies cost a lot of money, though. It would be the equivalent of putting all my eggs in one basket. If the film bombed I’d be—”

“
Chickenless?”

“Exactly. And I’d have to find the right actors and actresses.” He glanced over at her again. “Perhaps that wouldn’t be so hard though. These days it seems everyone is trying their hand at acting.”

She smiled back at him weakly, feeling more trapped by the second.

“Besides,” he went on. “I don’t know that I have the stamina to do the whole movie. I’m not sure it’s worth it to try.”

“If you believe in something, then it’s always worth it to try, even if you fail.”

He shrugged. “You may be right. But it would take a lot of my ti
me, and I don’t have the best luck balancing work and my daughter.”

Just the segue she needed. “Don’t you have someone to help you?” she asked.

“I have a nanny.”

“Is she a good nanny?” Clarissa asked. “I mean, do you like her?”

Slade smiled. “She’s a good nanny. Although . . .”

“Although what?”

“Although sometimes she does things that make me wonder what in the world she’s thinking.”

Clarissa ran her hand along the door handle absentmindedly. “That doesn’t sound like you get along well.”

“Sometimes we get along very well.”

“Oh.” She tried to analyze what this meant, but c
ouldn’t quite grasp its meaning. “So you consider her a friend?”

“Yes, except that friends listen to you more.
Sometimes Clarissa refuses to listen to me.”

The friendship part was good to hear. She didn’t listen to the rest of his comment. She just ruminated about friendship and wondered if he meant “friends” as in the same way he felt about Meredith or “friends” as in there could be more to it.
Before she could devise a question that would help her find out, the resort came into view.

Slade pointed it out.
“There’s the Mahalo Regency. Isn’t it beautiful? You drive up to it and get the feeling you’ve been here before.”

Clarissa shifted in her seat uncomfortably. “Um, yes, you do.”
He knows,
she thought.
Somehow he knows, and any moment now, he’s going to reach over and unmask me.

Slade pulled into the parking lot.
“I need to talk to you about something before we go inside.”

“Oh?” She braced herself for the accusation.

“You see, while I was avoiding a certain woman, I gave some people the impression that you were my girlfriend. If it isn’t too much to ask, could you play along for tonight?”

“
Sure,” Clarissa said. “I mean, if it will help you out.”

He slowed the car down as they drove up to the front of the building. “It will be our own
masquerade within a masquerade,” he said and winked at her.

She smiled back at him and fiddled with her claws.

So he didn’t know.

Of course he didn’t know. How could he have known? She was just being paranoid, and if she didn’t start acting with more confidence, she’d end up giving herself away.

Slade put the car in park, and a valet came and opened the door for her. She stepped out, then waited for Slade to join her. When he did, she held out her arm for him to take. Instead, he put his hand around her waist and drew her close.

“Remember,” he said, “
you’re my girlfriend.”

He guided her
through the lobby and to the ballroom with his arm around her waist the entire time.

The room was decorated with pumpkins,
fake spiderwebs, and cornstalks, but it was the people who caught her attention: Robin Hood, Rapunzel, The Grim Reaper, Marie Antoinette, and a couple of Klingon warriors all mingled in the crowd. She also noticed Zorro. He stood in a corner with one arm around a girl in a red devil’s miniskirt and the other around a buxom genie. She wore her bottle around her neck and very little else. He seemed quite engrossed with both women and not at all concerned with what Cinderella might be doing. Which is why, Clarissa supposed, he hadn’t dressed as Prince Charming.

Slade saw her staring in that direction. “You’ve noticed Zorro at work.”

“Is that who he’s supposed to be? I thought he was Don Juan.”

Slade laughed.
“No, Don Juan is who he is in real life. As Zorro he gets to ride a horse—” Slade suddenly stopped himself. “I’ve forgotten—Landon is one of your favorite actors. I should introduce you.”