The Touch by Randall Wallace Page B

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    Lara caught the glance. She snapped, “What?” But she knew what.
    â€œNothing, Dr. Blair.” Angelica tried to look grim and hide her smirk.
    Lara turned her face back toward the window, and sitting there above the clouds, released from work and the world, she let her mind drift . . .
    And she dreamed. She was not asleep; she felt more wide awake than ever before. And floating through her mind was a vision. Her body, wrapped in wedding-gown lace, sailing slowly through a world of clouds; weightless, a buoyant ballet from the hidden recesses of Lara’s heart . . .
    At the beginning of her fantasy, she soared alone, amazed to find herself in her own heaven . . .
    But this being her heaven, she was not alone. As her body turned, there was now a baby snuggled against her chest—a baby with blue eyes like the girl at the clinic . . .
    And drifting through this cloudy nirvana with them was Andrew Jones. He held Lara’s outstretched hand, delicately, by the fingertips, swirling through the milky sunlight above the world. It was a scene like Michelangelo might paint.
    Lara, Jones, and the baby—their baby, for they are the mother and father—nestled in this bed of a dream sky . . .
    Lara stared out the window. She could see it now, those forms dancing across the irises of her eyes.
    She closed her eyes, pressing out the images, turning herself away. She had work to do, and she couldn’t do it drifting among the clouds.
    * * *
    Jones drove through the Virginia countryside in his old station wagon. He headed north of Charlottesville, out into the rolling hill country where people wealthy enough to buy indulgence properties had invested in horse farms; in recent years many Hollywood figures had found themselves drawn to the area and some even lived there full time. Like most things in Virginia, the history of the place worked its way into the bones of even the newly rich, and their homes of stone and timber blended well with the brick colonial houses that echoed Williamsburg and Monticello. The sun was over the horizon now, and bright, but it was still early and there were no cars on the road lined with oaks and hickories, leafless in November.
    Most of the older churches in Virginia’s wealthiest areas were Episcopal, a reflection of the time two hundred fifty years before, when it was illegal under the rules of the British government for anyone in the Commonwealth to be a member of any other denomination. But not far along the road Jones came to a Lutheran church, built by the descendants of the German immigrants who had brought their skills in mining, glassmaking, woodwork, and horsemanship into the fertile markets of the New World. The church was small yet stately, faced entirely with gray stone, beneath a tall slate roof. Jones had always found it quite beautiful.
    He stopped on the paved roundabout that served as the church’s parking lot, stopped his car, and got out. There was no one around this early in the morning, and no one passed on the road except a pickup truck full of hay bound in tight bales.
    Jones walked toward the church, but instead of going in, he moved past the front door and kept walking to the short forest of stone monuments that made up the small cemetery that characterized every old church in Virginia. Without stopping, for he well knew the way, he approached a grave.
    Faith’s grave.
    How her body had come to rest here, in the graveyard of a church she had never attended, was for Jones a curious story of pride mixed with baffling religious prejudice. Faith’s father’s family had attended a Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, and he had married her mother there; Faith’s mother was not religious but—she later told her daughter—she had found the church to be a lovely setting for sprays of flowers and men in tuxedoes and a bride in a white wedding gown. (Jones had learned about all of this