It All Started...

by David W. Smith

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Kimberly was in awe as they walked along the marbled floors.

  He held her hand as they visited various shops; elegant and sparkling retail outlets that sold everything from clothing to toys, from perfume to electronics.

  Lance soon found that Kimberly was like her father—frugal. She enjoyed everything she saw, but was hesitant to try anything on or to purchase something that happened to catch her eye. Yet, Lance was finally able to convince her to buy a beautiful soft pink dress that was marked down from $250 to $94.99. It flowed in appealing, flattering lines when she emerged from the dressing room, pirouetting in front of a full-length three-sided mirror. Lance’s wide-eyed look had approved the dress and the pleased smile he saw upon Kimberly’s face.

  “It’s you,” Lance said simply.

  “Oh, I’ve never owned anything like it.” Kimberly grinned as she adjusted the shoulder straps and looked herself over in the gilded mirror. Her blond hair fell gracefully over her shoulders. “I feel so…pink,” Kimberly laughed, watching the mid-length hem dancing around her thighs.

  Lance smiled, feeling very pleased with himself.

  Waiting for Kimberly just outside the doors of the shop, Lance watched people pass by. He spied a magic shop two doors down and on the other side of the Mall from where he stood.

  As he stepped back into the clothing shop, he called out, “Kimberly?” The saleswoman who had patiently helped Kimberly try on the dress was folding the lovely chiffon creation neatly into a box. “I’m going to be over at the magic shop right across the way,” Lance pointed in the right direction.

  “Okay. I’m almost done here.”

  Lance turned and headed out across the mall. Back home, his tennis partner, Mike, was an avid amateur magician in addition to being a tennis instructor. Many a time after a tennis match, Mike would astound opponents with slight of hand and card tricks. Lance thought a little magical gift, like a book or a new trick, might be fun to give his friend.

  Lance was always impressed with such feats of dexterity and manipulation by his friend and other magicians he’d seen perform. Through the shop window he watched as a small crowd gathered in front of the counter. The clerk, obviously a magician himself, made a playing card magically float, spin and fly around the spectators. Lance smiled, knowing the secret of that trick. Even as the secret had been revealed to him years ago, he still enjoyed watching a professional execute the effect, and seeing the resulting look of awe the visual trick inspired on those who watched.

  Lance continued to watch as the magician finished his trick and the crowd began to disperse, many of whom were still talking about what they had seen as they exited the shop. A few stragglers were begging him to perform the trick again. The magician, well trained in both the performance of magic as well as making sales, convinced two young boys to “invest” in purchasing that particular magic trick for themselves.

  Just as he was about to enter the shop and look around, Lance noticed the shop address on the upper corner of the large plate glass window. He tilted his head at the numbers, each one being spelled out with playing cards that overlapped each other as if in a fan. The letters before the numbered cards said ‘Magic Masters’, the name of the shop.

  Kimberly came up beside him, her package under her arm.

  “I didn’t know you liked magic.” She looked inside the shop at a number of people who milled about the displays, books, and counters that housed interesting magical devices.

  “Uh, Kim.” He sounded distracted. Kimberly had never heard him call her that. “Does the shop address look familiar to you?”

  Kimberly looked up and saw the numbers two, seven, and three displayed as fanned cards, a diamond, spade and hearts representing the suits.

  At first she was going to say “No,“ but then it hit her. “The cards on the animation cels,” Kimberly gasped, putting her free hand on his shoulder as he turned to face her.

  They looked at each other for a moment and instantly said at the same time, “Walt’s clue!”

  They laughed at their simultaneous remark.

  “Do you think it could be an address Walt was trying to tell us?”

  Eyes bright, Lance looked back at the numbers, smiling. “Perhaps, Kimberly. Perhaps.”

  Forgotten were the remainder of the shops, the intermittent show held in the middle of the mall every hour, and even the reason they were in Vegas—relaxation.

  Lance and Kimberly made a beeline back to the parking garage.

  “Since the break-in, I didn’t want to leave the animation cels or the clue at my place,” Lance told her as they speed-walked to the car. He cast a sideways glance at Kimberly next to him. “I also thought we might need something to pass the time in the hotel room.”

  Kimberly looked over at Lance with a gleam in her eye. “What, you didn’t want to play cards or watch television?”

  “Nah.… But I did have other interests in mind.”

  They reached the car and Lance opened the trunk, put in her new dress box, then closed it quickly, not taking anything out.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Too dark in the parking garage to look at the cels the way we need to.” Lance was still thinking about what he wanted to do with them. “Let’s go to the hotel, check in and then let’s look at the cels in the quiet….” Lance looked around the shadowy parking structure, then finished, “and in the security of our room.”

  Kimberly agreed as the two jumped in the car.

  Exiting the garage and turning right, they headed back down the Strip the way they had come earlier. The Luxor Hotel was back another mile.

  After waiting for traffic to let up for a moment, Lance chirped the tires and gunned the small car into traffic and made it without any cars honking at him.

  Less than a minute later, a black Cadillac pulled out into the rush of traffic.

  Lance tossed their two bags onto the king-sized bed in his portion of the suite and sat down. Kimberly sat next to him as he pulled the briefcase onto his lap.

  Where sitting on a bed in a hotel room with Lance might have otherwise been awkward for Kimberly, or at least dangerously exciting, she didn’t have anything on her mind other than what Lance had in the briefcase.

  “Why didn’t we think of this before?” His mysterious question baffled her.

  “Think of what?” Kimberly wasn’t sure what he was referring to. She figured Lance thought that the playing cards on the animated cels might represent an address. But, an address number without a street or even a city would be pretty hard to determine…if the cards represented a numbered address at all.

  “I think these three cels are hiding something else.” Lance pushed the little tabs to open the case with a loud click. Propping open the lid and pulling out a manila folder, he handed it to Kimberly while he set the case on the floor.

  Kimberly held the folder on her lap and opened it, the opening pointed toward Lance. He pulled out the three clear plastic sheets and held them up in front of him, spread between his hands. Besides the colored animated playing cards and the characters from Alice in Wonderland on each eight by nine-inch clear plastic sheet, there was something else; centered along the bottom of each sheet was a set of hand-written letters. When Lance had originally examined the sheets, he thought the letters identified the production position of each cel—where each particular sheet fell within the tens of thousands of cels that would need to be produced for a full-length animated motion picture. Or, it was possible that they were identification markings for music and/or dialogue that would be recorded later after an entire scene had been drawn. He hadn’t given the random letters much thought.

  That was until he saw the playing-card address at the magic shop.

  “See these letters?” Lance pointed to the handwritten, unidentifiable letters along the bottom of each frame.

  Kimberly nodded, looking at the letters which seemed to have no meaning.

  The first sheet had the
letters M N T E U, the second sheet read, A __ R T S; the third sheet had, I S E __ A

  “Do you think those could be abbreviations for something?” Kimberly indicated the letters on the first page. “Like that could be ‘minute’ or ‘miniature’ or something?”

  “Well, that’s what I thought at first, too.” Lance looked up from the lettering. “Then I thought it stood for initials of the animators responsible for drawing each page or markings for dialogue and music that would be added later.”

  “So that magic shop didn’t make you think of an address with these playing cards on each sheet, like these, then?” Kimberly pointed to the three different playing cards depicted on the three cels.

  “Not at all.” A sly smile was beginning to form on his lips. Kimberly looked at him and slapped his shoulder playfully.

  “What!? Tell me what you know,” Kimberly demanded with a laugh, her eyes wide and expectant.

  Lance took his time, not because he was trying to drive Kimberly mad, but because he wasn’t one hundred percent sure that he was correct.

  He started to explain. “The address on the magic shop had three cards fanned out like a magician holding a deck of cards out for a spectator to choose one.” Lance paused. As if to clarify his last sentence, he added, “You see, I have a friend who does some card tricks.”

  “I don’t care about some magician friend of yours!” Kimberly laughingly shouted. “What is it about that address?”

  “Well, see? The cards were overlapped.” Lance held the three plastic sheets so that the ace, which was drawn in the left-middle of the sheet, was on the bottom. The next sheet, the three of hearts, was drawn nearly in the middle. The last sheet, which had the two of spades being drawn slightly on the right side of its sheet, Lance put on top of the others. He held the sheets out like three cards fanned out. Instead of saying something like, “Here, pick a card,” he took the three sheets and held them up toward the window where the afternoon sun was still bright.

  “Watch.” Lance lined the three sheets up together. The way the cards were drawn looked just like the cards that were on the magic shop…fanned apart but still overlapping.

  “I don’t get it,” Kimberly murmured with her eyebrows pinched together as she stared intently at the playing cards on the sheets.

  “It isn’t the cards.” Lance gave her a knowing grin. “Look at the letters.”

  With a gasp, Kimberly now saw exactly what Lance had seen.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t see it before!” exclaimed Kimberly, her hand covering her mouth.

  “It was right there all along.” Lance shook his head as he looked at the three cels he held together in his hand. “But, like Walt’s other clues, it required more than just a little work….” He paused, thinking back to what Walt had written in the diary he and Adam had found. He smiled oddly. “It all started with a moose, you know.”

  “Daddy used to say that, too. I was never exactly sure what he meant.”

  “Walt had written it in his diary, and then he explained about the cartoon it referred to. The moral of the story was to choose your friends wisely and that two heads were better than one.”

  “But, I didn’t come up with anything, you did.” Once the words were out of her mouth, Kimberly looked somewhat deflated by her recognition of her lack of help.

  “I would never have seen that magic shop, its address, and the layered cards had you and I not come here together.” Lance took hold of Kimberly’s chin with two of his fingers. He leaned in and gave her a soft kiss. “And, for us, it all started!” he murmured, gazing into her eyes.

  Kimberly smiled, excited by what they had just discovered and the emotions she felt when Lance had kissed her. Lance reached over to the dresser next to the bed to set the cels down. He had seen the discouraged look in her eyes and would do anything in the world to make it go away. He had one more thing to tell her. “And Kimberly, I really like working with you. You’re a lot more fun than Adam.” He then kissed her again, firm and promising. Kimberly’s fingers reached up and ran through his thick hair as she kissed him back. “Now that that’s settled, let’s go out and celebrate!”

  On the dresser, the three cels neatly sat together. Along the bottom of the three pages, the letters that had been an enigma just moments before now fell in a straight line together.

  M A I N S T R E E T U S A

  Lance and Kimberly now had a street name to go with the numbers.

  As tempting as it was to check out of the hotel, hop in the Aston Martin and test the reliability of her radar detector as they sped back to Anaheim, they decided instead to celebrate their discovery more sedately by going out to dinner. Lance figured that if the clue, provided it was where they thought it was, had been safely hidden for over forty years, it could wait another twenty-four hours before they began their search. Actually, Lance felt as though they were celebrating something more than just solving the latest clue. They were celebrating themselves.

  Kimberly and Lance were both equally enthusiastic about the discovery of the coded address on the set of animated cels Walt had left behind. What was perhaps just as exciting to them was the relationship that they both felt was starting to grow and take wings; a relationship that was now built on mutual trust and mutual respect—even though it had begun with the two of them being thrown together by mysterious and bizarre circumstances.

  They decided to dress up for the special occasion with Kimberly modeling her new dress for Lance as he finished shaving in front of his bathroom mirror in the suite. Afterward, he changed into tailored pants, an off-white shirt with an amber tie that blended with his eyes, topped off by a nice Italian sport coat.

  As Kimberly put the finishing touches on her hair, Lance knocked and then walked into her room. A soft kiss on her exposed neck sent a shiver of goose bumps over her arms and neck. Encouraged by her reaction, Lance kissed her again once they were in the elevator that took them down to the enormous lobby of the Luxor. When the valet brought around the Aston Martin, Lance held the door for Kimberly as she settled into her seat.

  “I think I’m enjoying this.” Kimberly was practically breathless from all his attention.

  An honest, serious expression crossed Lance’s face as he stared into her eyes. “I’ve never enjoyed kissing anyone as much as I do you.” Their eyes still locked, Lance knew he told her the truth—and knew his life was changed forever.

  Once the glance was broken, her passenger door was shut. “Where are you taking me?” Kimberly was finding it harder and harder to keep her eyes off his handsome face. His attractiveness took on a different light than before, and she wanted to memorize every curve and plane that made up Lance Brentwood.

  “I’m taking you to the Top.” Lance threw her a sly smile but didn’t elaborate.

  Kimberly looked at him quizzically. She had expected something like “French” or “Pizza” or some exotic name of a restaurant that she’d never even heard of before.

  Enjoying the mystery instead of explaining further, Lance simply pointed. Up ahead, as they drove north on Las Vegas Boulevard, Kimberly followed the line from his finger.

  A gasp escaped Kimberly’s lips when she saw that his finger pointed at the tallest structure in the southwest: The Stratosphere Hotel. Kimberly looked back at Lance. “Is there really a restaurant up there?” Her words were a little tentative. While she had no problem flying in an airplane or climbing out onto a branch in the Treehouse at Disneyland, she had never been up in a building so tall and so narrow…let alone to have dinner in such a place.

  “Not only is there a restaurant up there, there’s also a roller coaster.” As they approached the needle-like structure that rose almost twelve-hundred feet above downtown Las Vegas, he had one more tease. “That is, if you’re game.”

  “Uh, no way, Lance.”

  Lance smiled at the shocked look that had spread over her face. “Don’t worry.” He had to laugh as he, too, looked upward. “Even I won’t go on that one.”

/>   As Lance drove past Sahara Avenue, making the curve into Downtown, Kimberly craned her neck at the towering structure just ahead to their left. She had no idea what it must be like to look out from such a height and see the sights of Las Vegas far below. Hungry for new adventures—as well as a good dinner—she found she was eager to see what awaited her.

  The Top of the World restaurant, located below the observation deck near the top of the towering structure, revolved 360 degrees every hour, giving patrons undeniably the best view of the valley. The twinkling lights of the city and beyond stretched all the way to the slopes of Mt. Charleston to the west and to the mountains that bordered the Lake Mead recreational area and the Valley of Fire to the east.

  “To Walt.” Lance held a glass of 1985 French Bordeaux just after the waiter had uncorked the bottle and poured two glasses and left to turn in their orders.

  Kimberly was smiling. In fact, she felt that her smile was now a permanent fixture on her face. “Yes, to Walt.” Their eyes met and words, at that point, were totally unnecessary. They sipped the wine, the warmth of their feelings mixed with the warmth of the wine, the view and subtle music that permeated the room to add additional ambiance.

  “Main Street, USA… Wow.” Lance shook his head as he once again thought about the clue. It was possibly the hundredth time since they had changed and driven downtown.

  “At least now we know where we need to start looking.” Kimberly let out an appreciative “ooh!’ as salads were placed on the table in front of them.

  “Each store on Main Street is supposed to have an address.” As Lance took a bite of his Caesar’s Salad, he recalled the clue for the Penny Arcade and finally seeing the address on either side of the arcade’s sign. “I know at least some of shops have three-digit addresses.” The dressing had just a hint of anchovies mixed in. “You want to try a bite?