Free A Race to Splendor by Ciji Ware

well-heeled nobs hazarding thousands of dollars on a single hand of cards.
    Now the interior was merely a jumble of fallen gas lighting fixtures, piles of bricks and mortar, heaps of wood, and a long, elaborate cherry wood bar toppled onto its face. Two-thirds of the roof lay open to the sky. Amelia leaned forward and squinted into the gloom, steadying herself against an exposed four-by-four whose splintered surface pressed painfully into her lacerated palm.
    “Father!” she shouted. “Henry Bradshaw, are you in here?”
    Her cries were greeted by ghostly silence. An act of God had changed J.D. Thayer’s glittering gambling den into a pile of rubbish. Against the only interior wall of the club left standing, Amelia could barely distinguish the outline of several upholstered sofas piled high with debris. On one, beneath five-foot mounds of plaster and wood, a length of crimson silk and the slender arm of a woman lay limply amidst the rubble. Amelia had overheard scuttlebutt that female Chinese “hostesses” were employed here for the enjoyment of a select clientele at the new club. Here was the gruesome proof.
    And Father? Please, God, don’t let my father be—
    Weak from her own ordeal and dismayed by everything in view, Amelia cast one last frightened glance around the shattered room and saw no other signs of life. Maybe her father had the sense to call it a night before the quake struck. Perhaps, for once, Henry Bradshaw had done the sensible thing and joined the chaotic throng jockeying to board the first boat to Oakland, even beating Ezra Kemp in his ignoble retreat.
    By now, huge clouds of black smoke downtown tarred the sky, tendrils belching a mile high. Could an entire city burn to the ground, Amelia wondered.
    Just then, a ragged voice called out, weak and rasping.
    “Help… Please help.”
    She gazed down into the club’s devastation from the street’s higher elevation, barely able to make out the shadowy figure of a man slumped against a doorjamb with a small dog curled up at his side. It was difficult to determine that the man’s hair, sprinkled with plaster dust, was nearly as dark as his fashionable evening clothes. Dried blood crusted his battered face.
    Amelia immediately recognized her grandfather’s dog, Barbary, who normally slept in the basement and had somehow survived the cataclysmic events upstairs. Then she saw that J.D. Thayer was painfully pulling himself to a standing position. He clung to the threshold with one arm and stretched the other toward her in a gesture of abject supplication. His face contorted in agony and he paused as if he were gathering his very last ounce of strength.
    “Please… I beg of you. Help us! The roof’s caved in on—”
    Thayer’s voice broke as he gazed toward the couch where the woman’s arm, partially cloaked in red Chinese silk, protruded from a pile of debris. He pulled his eyes from the corpse and turned his head to stare at Amelia through the gloom, recognition dawning.
    “Please… I know I have no right… but in God’s name… can you help me?”

Chapter 6
    Amelia gazed past the ruins at the new owner of the Bay View Hotel, now a pathetic-looking creature huddling less than fifteen feet away, his gaze pleading. The cuts on his head looked deep and his voice sounded reedy. How could she ignore the suffering of a fellow human at a time like this, even if he’d wreaked havoc on her life? But who could come to his aid?
    “Of course I’ll try to help you, Mr. Thayer,” she assured him across the wreckage, “but you must tell me whom I can summon for you here.”
    Thayer looked at her strangely as if some discomforting thought just occurred to him. “Oh God…” he said and then fell silent.
    Amelia, the last person he’d expected as a potential rescuer, stood at the edge of the broken wall that overlooked the devastation below. It was impossible to envision how posh this establishment had appeared only a few hours earlier. The San