The Chase (Isaac Bell 1)

He feigned a hurt look. “I didn’t always work in my father’s bank. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and joined the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I helped put up and take down the tents, fed the elephants, and made repairs on the circus train.” He paused and a sad expression came across his face. “After eight months, my father found me, hauled me home, and sent me back to school.”

“So you’re a college man.”

“Harvard. Phi

Beta Kappa, in economics.”

“And smart,” she added, properly impressed.

“And you?” he probed. “Where did you go to school?”

“I was in the first graduating class of Stanford University. My degree was in law, but I soon found that law firms were not in the habit of hiring women lawyers, so I went into banking.”

“Now it’s my turn to be impressed,” said Bell honestly. “It seems I’ve met my match.”

Suddenly, Marion went silent and a strange look came over her face. Bell thought something was wrong. He rushed to her side and slid his arm around her.

“Are you ill?”

She looked up at him from her coral green eyes. They seemed dark in thought. Then she gasped. “Montreal!”

He leaned toward her. “What did you say?”

“Montreal…Jacob and Margaret are going to make a run across the Canadian border to Montreal, where he can open another bank.”

“How do you know that?” asked Bell, bewildered at Marion’s strange attitude.

“I just remembered seeing the city Montreal scrawled on a notepad beside his telephone,” she explained. “I didn’t think it meant anything of importance and dismissed it from my mind. Now it all makes sense. The last place authorities would look for the Cromwells is in Canada. They can easily take on new identities and buy off the right people to become upstanding citizens who start up a solvent financial institution.”

The look of confusion faded from Bell’s face. “The piece fits,” he said slowly. “Canada is probably the last place we’d think to look. The obvious escape route used by felons over the years is over the southern border into Mexico, using that as a springboard to travel farther south.”

Then, slowly, his thoughts of the Cromwells evaporated and he became quiet, gentle, and loving as he picked her up in his arms. “I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you,” he said, his voice becoming low and husky. “You’re smarter than I am.”

Her whole body trembled as she entwined her arms around his neck. “Oh, God, Isaac. I love you, too.”

He gently touched his lips to hers as he carried her from the living room into the bedroom. She pulled away and looked up, her eyes now mischievous. “What about the lemon meringue pie?”

He gazed down at her lovely features and laughed. “We can always eat it for breakfast.”

Bell could not have predicted nor much less have known that within a few hours the pie would become but a dim memory.

37

CALLED THE HALLMARK OF THE WEST, THE SAN FRANCISCO of 1906 was a maze of contradictions. One writer described the city as the Babylon of grandiloquence, the Paris of romance, and the Hong Kong of adventure. Another went so far as to portray it as the gateway to paradise.

It may have been dynamic and exciting, but, in truth, San Francisco was a sprawling, filthy, soot-ridden, foul-smelling, brawling, corrupt, vulgar city with less charm than London in the seventeen hundreds. It intermingled incredible wealth with sordid poverty. Coal smoke from steamboats, locomotives, foundries, house furnaces and stoves enveloped streets already blanketed by the dung of thousands of horses. There were no sewage-treatment plants to be found and the blackened skies reeked of foul odors.

Most all the houses were built of wood. From the nice homes on Telegraph Hill to the stylish mansions of Nob Hill to the shacks and hovels in the outlying districts, it was described by the city’s fire chief as a sea of tinderboxes waiting to be lit.

The image and the myth were to change dramatically within two and a half minutes.

At 5:12 A.M., on the morning of April 18th, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The gas streetlights had been shut off and the cable cars began to clatter from their barns for their runs up and down the many hills of the city. Early workers began walking to their job as those who worked during the late-night hours headed home. Bakers were already at their ovens. Police on the early-morning shift still patrolled their beats, expecting another quiet day, as a light wind without the prevailing fog blew in from the west.

But at 5:12, the peaceful world of San Francisco and its surrounding towns was shattered by an ominous, rumbling roar that came from the depths of the earth a few miles under the sea beyond the Golden Gate.

Hell had come to San Francisco.

The foreshock shook the surrounding countryside and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Twenty-five seconds later, terrifying, undulating shock waves from the massive earthquake surged across the city like a monstrous hand sweeping stacks of books off a table.