The Fifth Harmonic by F. Paul Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

crescent grinning down at him, and remembered Maya's parting words.
    . . . the All-Mother . . . will give you a sign. Watch for it. She will smile on you to let you know that she wants you to be saved.
    This was crazy. Had she known he was coming to France? Had she known there'd be a partial eclipse? Possible, sure, but . . . damn!
    “Too much to drink?” he muttered, locating his empty glass and picking up the bottle of Graves. “Oh, no. I haven't had anywhere near enough to drink.”
    With a trembling hand he poured himself half a glass and wandered farther away from Mouchac. He stopped at the edge of the vineyard and leaned on one of the vine row end posts, careful to avoid the thorns of the traditional rose bush planted there.
    Calm down, he told himself. This eclipse didn't just happen out of the blue—it was expected, scheduled. Catherine had read about it in the paper. This was a regular phenomenon. Nothing supernatural about it. Certainly no All-Mother smiling down at him.
    And yet, it looked exactly like a smile. He realized that if he were back in the States now instead of here, he wouldn't have seen a damn thing—it was mid-afternoon on the East Coast.
    But I am here, he thought. And I've been asking myself why.
    Against his will, his thoughts gravitated to Maya and her proposal.
    Will already had an irrevocable trust set up for Kelly, so she was taken care of. Annie would have no financial problems after she remarried. So he could see no reason why he couldn't liquidate his assets, give half away to, say, cancer research, and stick the rest in a trust set up as Maya had described.
    He had no illusions: Before year's end, Kelly would wind up with the contents of that trust as well.
    And then what? Head off with Maya into the wilds of Latin America—what she'd called “Mesoamerica”—and search for a cure?
    Yeah, right.
    Then again, hadn't he wanted to spend what little time he had left traveling? Why not do the traveling in “Mesoamerica”?
    Will poured some more wine.
    Yes, really . . . why not? Why the hell not?
    Not in search of a cure, but just for the sheer damn bloody hell of it. A truly crazy, futile, wrongheaded gesture, but in some perverse way its very craziness, futility, and wrongheadedness appealed to him.
    In his entire life, when had he ever done anything on impulse? Never. If he was ever going to act on a reckless urge, this was the time. Because soon he'd be unable to act, and not too long after that, he'd have no more impulses, reckless or otherwise.
    Yes, Will Burleigh, he thought. Why not choose something utterly foolish as the last grand gesture of your otherwise safe, sane, staid, straight-laced, predictable life? Go off with a New Age healer, go through all the motions, perform every ritual she prescribes, all without one shred of hope of a cure.
    But who knows? he thought. Maybe I'll be surprised.
    He'd lived his whole life believing that the universe functioned according to the physical laws of matter and energy set down by human science. He'd always believed those laws to be right.
    But now he realized that a small desperate part of him ached for them to be wrong.
    He lifted his glass and toasted the grin in the sky, growing lopsided now as earth's shadow moved on.
    “Mesoamerica, here I come!”

5
Westchester County, NY
    What had seemed like such an easy, straightforward decision in France turned out to be a complicated process back home.
    Will had broken off from the tour and returned to the U.S. the day after the eclipse, but he didn't contact Maya immediately. Before he became involved with this woman, he wanted to know more about her. So he got in touch with Max Eppinger, his long-time lawyer and an old friend. Max put him on to a private investigator named Vincent Terziski.
    Will met with Terziski, a heavyset man with a florid complexion, and hired him to check out the mysterious woman “healer” with the shop in Katonah.
    The detective stopped by Will's apartment two