Kat walks briskly out of the courthouse and into the golden afternoon.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to these wonderful people with regard to the writing of this book: Jeanne Dickson and Hayley Dickson for the walking tours of San Francisco; Sylvia Rowan, a gracious and helpful librarian at the San Francisco History Center; John Privara, a volunteer with the California State Railroad Museum; Michael McCurdy, law librarian at California State Library; and Malcolm E. Barker, whose book Three Fearful Days—a compilation of firsthand accounts of the 1906 earthquake and fire—was indispensable to me. As always, I’m grateful beyond words for my editor at Berkley, Claire Zion, who sent me back to the drawing board twice with this one, and I’m so glad she did; for my entire team at Berkley—including Craig Burke, Danielle Keir, Tara O’Connor, and Fareeda Bullert; and for my agent extraordinaire, Elisabeth Weed. Many thanks, too, to my mom, Judy Horning, for careful proofreading, and to my sweet husband, Bob, for cheering me on on my hardest days.

I endeavored to present all the details of the 1906 earthquake and fire as accurately as possible. I confess I did take liberty with fictional San Rafaela, as I wanted to control every aspect of the town where the Loralei Inn was located and the placement of the abandoned and also fictional mine. San Rafaela could exist a few miles from San Mateo, but it does not. All the other cities and towns mentioned in the book are real places, as are the chilling details of the three days San Francisco burned. It is believed the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 would have registered a magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale. As I have described in the pages of this novel, it struck in two immediately successive rounds, starting just before daybreak on Wednesday, April 18. The first round lasted only a few breaths’ time; the second, a terrifying forty-five seconds. The quake broke apart major water mains in the heart of San Francisco and burst open gas lines, which then started dozens of fires almost instantaneously. Roughly five square miles of San Francisco burned over the next three days—five hundred city blocks. An estimated twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed and half the city’s four hundred thousand inhabitants were made homeless. The official death toll in San Francisco from both the quake and the resulting fires is estimated to have exceeded three thousand people.

Since then the study of earthquakes has come a long way. With state-of-the-art equipment, today’s seismologists have been able to create detailed diagrams of California’s renowned San Andreas Fault, a 750-mile-long line that marks the boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates. The movement of the earth can now be charted with amazing accuracy, but no one can adequately predict when that movement will occur. The San Andreas Fault is famous for major earthquakes, including this one in 1906 and another in 1989. A 100-mile section of the fault, running from San Bernardino south to San Diego, has remained unnervingly quiet for nearly three hundred years. It is expected that someday it will awaken from its slumber, but no one can say when that day will come. There is always that gnawing question, even among those of us who live in the Golden State, if the Big One will strike in our lifetime.