Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One)

by L B Gschwandtner

  Alanna nodded, looking down at the tankard and wondered again what was in these things. They certainly made her feel great, and in just that moment a mist surrounded them and they felt as if they were spinning slowly and then floating in warm air until they manifested in the hall outside Shelly’s suite. The sun had come up and a waiter was wheeling a breakfast cart out of the open doorway.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “So you want me to believe that you are—what did you say—not alive but not dead? What do you think I am, an idiot?”

  Shelly was already dressed. She’d eaten a hearty breakfast and was ready to get to the casino. “Maybe I should try another hotel’s casino. Maybe I’d have better luck somewhere else. Luck’s a funny thing, you know. It’s not like you can find it just anywhere.”

  “Shelly,” Joe used a stern voice. “Sit down for a minute. What we’re telling you is important.”

  “Joe’s right. It’s absolutely true. We don’t understand it all yet ourselves but for some reason we’ve been partnered, and for some reason we’ve been sent to help you. If we can help you, we help ourselves. See?” Alanna sounded just a bit desperate.

  “No. I don’t see at all. But I don’t really care as long as you can get me out of my predicament. I don’t care if you were sent from heaven or hell.” Shelly picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder, then turned to Joe with a second thought. “You’re not the devil, are you? Because I may be a gambler and a sinner but I would not stoop that low.”

  “I’m not the devil,” Joe assured her and took her by the arm, propelling her gently toward the door. “Think of me as your instructor. Now one more thing. When we get outside this door, no one will be able to see or hear us but you.”

  “But what about dinner last night? You ate with me. The waiter saw you. The check was for three of us. I saw the bill. ”

  “I know but forget about that. It’s not important. What’s important is that we get you off those slot machines and you start playing something where you can actually win.”

  Shelly’s lip protruded like a sulky child. “I like slots.”

  “It’s a sucker game. I wouldn’t even call it a game. Have you ever played poker?”

  Shelly sighed. They had reached the elevator. “Back in college sometimes we’d have a girls’ night but it was kind of lame. There were always too many players. It was just an excuse to get together and drink or smoke dope without guys there.”

  “We’re going to play for real here.”

  “Yes,” Alanna added. “And you’re going to win. Joe’s going to help you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to be invisible and play along with you, right behind you.”

  “Are we going to cheat?”

  “No,” Joe said emphatically.

  “That’s too bad,” Shelly laughed. “If I were invisible I’d cheat at everything.”

  “Not if your life hung in the air like a cobweb,” Alanna told her. “Not if you knew you were being watched and everything you did was being recorded somewhere.”

  The elevator doors opened and they all stepped in. Shelly looked downright serious for the first time since they’d met her.

  “So my grandmother was right? Someone up in heaven is watching everything we do all the time?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call where we were heaven, but they sure seem to know a lot about what’s going on down here. They knew about you and your little problem. And they knew you were digging yourself into a great big hole.” Joe pushed the number one button and the elevator began its slide down to the casino floor.

  *****

  Shelly traded her remaining vouchers for chips while Joe found a table where they were playing Texas Hold’em, a game Shelly claimed to have watched on TV. She approached the table cautiously. She could see Joe, who was standing right behind her, holding out the empty seat, but apparently no one else at the table could see him. Alanna seemed to have disappeared once again, which was fine by Shelly. That girl seemed a little snooty to her, always fading in and out like that, and acting all high and mighty about tawdry Vegas.

  “Joining us, miss?” the dealer asked, as she slid into the chair and briskly nodded. It was a ten dollar table with four other players seated, all men. They did not acknowledge her arrival at all, a fact that stung Shelly’s ego a bit. She was wearing, after all, a hot pink slip dress and she thought she looked pretty cute. Shelly stacked the chips in four careful piles in front of her and slowly exhaled.

  “Yes,” she said it calmly as if she’d sat in at Texas Hold’em games for years. “I’m joining you.”

  “What he’s implying is that you need to ante up,” Joe whispered in her ear standing right behind her now. “Put a chip on the square in front of you.”

  “Only one?” she asked.

  “As many as you’d like,” the dealer said, and while his voice was polite and professional, it was obvious he was slightly annoyed to have a novice at his table.

  “Take it easy,” Joe said in her ear. “They can’t see me, but they can hear you. “Yeah. Start with one.”

  Her confidence shaken, Shelly slid a chip onto the square and settled back as the dealer shuffled with lightning fast hands. How many decks were they playing at once? Five, six, maybe more? The dealer crammed the cards into a dispenser and handed Shelly a card-shaped piece of black plastic.

  “Lady’s cut,” he said.

  “Stick it somewhere in the middle of the row of cards,” Joe told her. “He’ll start dealing from the point where you divide the deck. That’s how they prove he’s not cheating, you know, stacking the deck, and be prepared to do this often. A lot of poker players think it’s good luck to let a female cut the deck and you’re the only girly girl at this particular table.”

  Now that she understood his voice was always going to be right at her ear, Shelly felt a bit more sure of herself. She slipped the black plastic into the middle of the stack and then leaned back in her chair while the cards were dealt, using the pause to survey her fellow players. It was a mixed group, to put it in the most polite terms. A man with a two-day growth of beard wearing a black cowboy hat and a black shirt with turquoise embroidered trim. A young kid of about twenty-two in a T-shirt featuring a picture of a Grateful Dead album cover. A guy well past middle age wearing a nest of gold chains tangled around his neck. A thin black man who looked like a jazz musician Shelly had once seen at a club. And Shelly.

  Chapter Eighteen

  While Shelly played poker, Alanna wandered through the over street mall that connected the Bellagio to the other hotels on the Strip. A walkway of shops and restaurants, one after the other, it was a chain of pretty places where a woman could browse all the baubles anyone could imagine. She’d been relieved to see that, once you got out of the clanging, awful casino, Vegas was actually rather attractive, and here was an upscale mall where she felt perfectly comfortable. Was this another clue to her past? She wandered past Gucci, Prada, Versace, Jimmy Choo and found herself humming as she strolled. It felt good to be back in the world, to squint against the bright sunlight that came in through the broad mall windows, to hear the piped-in voice of Beyonce. The food looked better out here too, once you got away from the casino and that overdone old-fashioned type of restaurant where they’d been the night before. She stopped for a gelato and smiled down at the vats of beautiful pale colors lined up within the case. Pink pomegranate, green pistachio, all the different shades of berries. But when she finally decided on hazelnut and the man handed her the doll-like tasting spoon it was exactly like the food last night—flat and flavorless. She sighed and threw it into the nearest trash can. This didn’t make any sense. How could she enjoy colors and textures and sounds, but have lost her sense of taste?

  She supposed she should turn back and see how Joe and Shelly were doing at the poker tables, but now that she had gotten used to the idea, Alanna was enjoying the fact she could make herself visible, and then invisible. A couple o
f times she tried to manifest—to sit on a bench located at the front of one of the huge, bubbling fountains and teleport herself to a bench located at the back—but she didn’t seem to have the ability to move herself through space. At least not yet. But the visibility/invisibility switch appeared to be largely under her control and surprisingly useful for shopping.

  Normally she might have felt uncomfortable going into a boutique like Marc Jacobs and just walking around, so it was a kick to go into invisibility mode and be able to float from one pricey shop to another without having to worry about a salesperson swooping down on her. She even went into Tiffany’s, slipping unseen past the uniformed guards and weaving her way among the shoppers. She stopped to observe a breathless young woman in front of one of the glass cases. She was busty and blonde and leaning on the arm of a man old enough to be her grandfather, but of course this was Vegas, so the man was undoubtedly not her grandfather. The salesperson had removed a dark blue velvet panel with six obscenely large diamond rings on it and the girl was trying on one and then the other, lifting her hand to the light and turning it left or right and squealing.

  The scene created an emotion in Alanna that she couldn’t quite name. Memories had been coming back to her as she walked—the pleasure of the strong noontime sun falling on her face, the fact that sometime she must have loved hazelnut, her attraction to some things and her revulsion at others. As she had approached Caesar’s Palace she had noticed that she could name the statues as she passed them—she knew Zeus from Poseidon, she could recognize Medusa and Athena and Mercury.

  So she knew her Greek myths, she liked gelato and sunshine and high heel boots. Alanna recalled the way she had felt sitting in first class on the flight out to Vegas, that dim sense that she had been there before, and she could only conclude that in her previous life she had been fairly wealthy, well-educated, and accustomed to travel. And yet being in the expensive shops had made her uneasy, so uneasy that she had opted to slip behind a rack of clothes and emerge invisible. It made no sense.

  She stood beside the giggling blonde and looked down at the rings. They really were magnificent and she had the sudden urge to try one on. But of course to try on a ring, one had to have a finger, or at least a finger that was visible to a sales clerk. Alanna walked out of Tiffany’s and stood for a moment in the broad, open mall. She had looked at all the clothes but had not felt this urge to try any of them on so this was a new and surprising turn of events. Why did she have such a sudden, profound need to see a diamond on her hand? There were clues to her past identity everywhere, but Alanna didn’t seem to be able to follow them to any conclusion.

  *****

  “Okay,” Joe was saying. “Ready for a test?”

  Shelly dipped her chin down ever so slightly to signal “yes” to Joe. She had grown more comfortable at the table in the last couple of hours and while she didn’t pretend to understand all the strategies Joe had been whispering in her ear, she was definitely becoming more familiar with the rhythms of the game. In Texas Hold’em, everyone got two cards dealt down and then three cards were dealt face-up in the center of the table. They called these the flop and they were part of the hand of everyone at the table. After rounds of betting a fourth card was turned up, rather sensibly called the turn. And after more raises, checks, folds, and calls, finally a fifth card, called the river, was turned up, too. There were a lot of jokes about being saved on the river or destroyed on the river, the idea that this very last card could so dramatically change the game. Shelly would smile and nod at the jokes, as if she understood what everything around her meant. The men seemed to be gradually accepting her as a comrade in cards.

  A strange game, Shelly thought. Not at all like stud poker. Everyone at the table shared the five cards that were turned up so the real mystery was what everyone had in the hold, which is the two cards they’d been dealt face down. In fact, reading the hold appeared to be the whole challenge of the game, but Joe was evidently good at it. He had been telling her when to fold, when to call or raise and Shelly had gradually added nine more stacks of chips to the five she’d started with.

  She’d taken six pots, maybe seven. It wasn’t exactly the big hit she’d been hoping for, just more of a slow rise, and she wished there was some way she could turn in her chair and confer with Joe about taking bigger risks. She stretched her arms and glanced back over her shoulder, but when they made eye contact, he only shook his head. Patience, he seemed to be saying. You had to be able to wait until just the right moment. Shelly had never learned that lesson.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alanna took a slow walk around the fountain, a spot she’d found to be a good locale for materializing and dematerializing and when she re-entered Tiffany’s she was not only visible, but looking good. She didn’t understand exactly how this had happened, or why, but she had manifested in a Miu Miu dress with her hair expertly coiffed and when she strode into Tiffany’s there was a genteel stampede among the salespeople, all headed in her direction. She told the woman who got there first that she wanted to look at diamond rings. Perhaps a strange request coming from a woman alone, but apparently not all that strange by Vegas standards for the saleswoman promptly escorted Alanna to the case.

  “That one,” Alanna said, pointing to a simple, square cut diamond. Simple, yeah. Simple and humongous.

  Her hands were beautifully manicured too, Alanna was relieved to note as the saleswoman handed her the ring. “A wonderful choice,” the woman murmured, smiling as she slipped the ring out of its gray velvet holder. She must look like the bored mistress of some high roller, like a kept woman killing time in the shops while her sugar daddy sat hypnotized at the tables.

  She had been slowly regaining shards of memory all morning but, as Alanna pushed the ring onto her finger, she was hit with such a strong wave of emotion that for a second she felt dizzy. She pressed her thighs against the glass case, forced herself to breathe in deeply and smile. There was no doubt about it, this was a hint impossible to ignore. She’d worn a diamond ring before. Not as big as this one, of course not. But she had worn a square-cut solitaire diamond in her previous life. She was sure of it. For a split second she almost saw the face of the man who had given it to her, she almost recalled his name. It was so tantalizingly close, this memory, yet still not hers to hold.

  “Lovely, is it not?” the saleswoman asked mildly. “It’s beautiful on your hand.”

  Was it lovely? Alanna couldn’t answer. The ring felt heavy on her finger. It was beautiful, that was without question, but the same force that had compelled her to put it on now seemed to be compelling her to take it off. Had she been engaged before she died? Or maybe married? That was the only thing that made sense, but if she had been engaged, why could she not recall the name or face of her fiancé? Where was he right now? Still alive and mourning her loss?

  “Would you care to see another?” the saleswoman persisted and turned away to another case for just the slip of a moment.

  Before Alanna could answer, she realized that she was already fading from sight. She had always suspected somehow, on some level, that if she wore an engagement ring, some part of her would evaporate. Now she remembered she had told the man that. She couldn’t see his face or recall his name but she could hear her own voice saying: “But if I marry you, I might disappear.” Now with a real ring on her finger, sure enough, it was happening.

  Before she completely de-manifested, she remembered saying to the man, “Our connection has to be deep enough to last a lifetime.” The man’s face faded as Alanna struggled to hold on to her physical form. But she was dissolving and there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Ma’am?” the saleswoman said as she turned back holding a new tray of glittering gems in her hands, but all she heard back was the clatter of a three-carat, square-cut diamond ring, as it landed on the clear glass countertop.

  *****

  “All right baby, this is it,” Joe hissed and Shelly did her best to remain calm. She had a pair
of jacks in the hold and had caught a third in the flop. The minute she’d seen that third jack come up she’d wanted to throw every chip she had in the pot but Joe had persuaded her to do something he called the “slow play,” to make minimal raises with each cycle and thus make it more likely that other players would stay in the game longer. Stoke the pot, he’d told her. Stay calm.

  Joe was smart. Shelly saw this more with every hand. She had originally thought that he was giving her good advice because he had been moving around the table looking at everyone else’s hands, but it soon became clear that experienced poker players only take a quick glance at their hold cards and for the rest of the time keep them down. Joe wasn’t spying on the other players and he had no special powers at the table. Just his sharp mind, his ability to read faces, his knowledge of the game. And Joe evidently liked a calculated risk.

  But that had proven enough because a quick survey of her chips showed Shelly she had parlayed her measly three hundred dollars into three thousand and that three thousand was a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the pot in front of her now. Five people had stayed in the hand waiting for the river.

  The dealer’s swift hands moved across the table. A fourth jack.

  Shelly couldn’t help it. A small whistling sound escaped from her lips.

  “Don’t react,” Joe warned her. “We don’t want anyone to fold.”

  And they didn’t. Cowboy checked. Jazzman, who had already folded, regretfully shook his head. Chains raised.

  Grateful Dead called and re-raised.

  “Hmmm . . .” Joe said.

  Hmmm? Hmmm? Shelly wanted to turn around and slap him. But she knew what he was thinking. Two jacks were showing. Everybody at the table had at least that much. One of the jacks was a spade and the ten of spades was showing too, along with the eight.