The Christmas Child. Линда Гуднайт

       “What could be so terrible that a child would stop speaking?”

       Sophie asked. “I can’t imagine.”

      Something flickered in Kade’s stolid expression, a twitch of muscle, the narrowing of coffee-colored eyes in a hard face. “I plan to find out,” he said.

      “Your police experience should help us find Davey’s family,” Sophie said.

      “Us?”

      “Well …” She’d been there when Davey was found and she didn’t intend to walk away and leave him with all these unanswered questions. “I know the community really well. People trust me. They’ll talk to me. I don’t know the first thing about investigating a missing boy.” She stopped, frowned. Davey wasn’t missing exactly. “Or rather, a found boy. But I know how to deal with people.”

      Kade raised a palm. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s early yet. Someone may come home from work tonight, find their son gone, and call in. Problem solved.”

      “Do you think they will?” she asked hopefully.

      “To be honest?” He dropped his arms to his sides, shot a look toward the living room. “No.”

      Something in the sudden clip of his voice chilled Sophie’s bones.

      Dear Reader,

      Cookies are a major topic in The Christmas Child as well as around the Goodnight house! We love our cookies, especially chocolate chip, and have tried many variances on the old standby recipe. Here is one of our favorites, first discovered by my granddaughter, Lexi. Yummy!

       Lexi’s Cookies

      1 cup butter or stick margarine, softened

      ¾ cup brown sugar, packed

      ¾ cup granulated sugar

      1 egg

      2 ¼ cup all-purpose flour

      ½ teaspoon salt

      1 teaspoon soda

      ½ to 1 cup chopped pecans

      1 package semisweet chocolate chips (2 cups)

       Directions:

      Preheat oven to 375°.

      Cream butter or margarine; add sugars and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Stir in flour, salt and soda until well blended. Mix in chocolate chips and pecans. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a greased or sprayed cookie sheet. Bake for about 8–10 minutes.

      Until our next visit to Redemption, Merry Christmas and happy reading.

      About the Author

      LINDA GOODNIGHT Winner of a RITA^® Award for excellence in inspirational fiction, Linda Goodnight has also won a Booksellers’ Best, an ACFW Book of the Year and a Reviewers’ Choice Award from RT Book Reviews. Linda has appeared on the Christian bestseller list and her romance novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Active in orphan ministry, this former nurse and teacher enjoys writing fiction that carries a message of hope and light in a sometimes dark world. She and her husband, Gene, live in Oklahoma. Readers can write to her at [email protected], or c/o Love Inspired Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279.

      The Christmas Child

      Linda Goodnight

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

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      For Diane in Dallas, who makes me laugh and cheers me on, as well as all you other dependable, wonderful readers. You know who you are—and I treasure each of you. Thank you for your letters and emails, your Facebook messages and blog comments. This book is for you!

      For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

      —Isaiah 9:6

       Chapter One

      In twenty years of Dumpster diving, Popbottle Jones had found his share of surprises in other people’s trash. But nothing prepared him for what he discovered one chilly November dawn.

      Agile as a monkey at seventy-two, Popbottle hopped over the side of the giant bin located downwind of Redemption’s municipal building and dropped lightly onto a mound of battered cardboard boxes. The usual garbage and old-food smells rose to greet him, odors he’d trained his nose to ignore in pursuit of more profitable treasures. After all, he and his business partner, GI Jack, were in the recycling business.

      From one corner of the dimly lit bin came a scratching sound. His heart sank. Rats or kittens, he suspected. Rats he shooed. The kittens, though, troubled him. He’d never leave domestic creatures to be scooped into a compactor and bulldozed at a landfill.

      Gingerly picking his way through the mess, Popbottle directed his steps and his miner’s lamp toward the sound. His stomach plummeted. Not rats. Not kittens, though two eyes stared out. Blue eyes. Frightened eyes. The eyes of a child.

      * * *

      Taking a bullet would have been easier, cleaner, quicker. Dying slowly wasted a lot of time.

      Kade McKendrick dropped one hand to the golden retriever sitting patiently beside him along the riverbank and tried to relax.

      Even now, when he’d been shipped off to Redemption, Oklahoma, for R & R, he wielded a fishing rod like a weapon, fingers tight on the reel’s trigger. He’d become too paranoid to go anywhere unarmed.

      Memories swamped him. Faces swam up from the muddy red river to accuse. Kade shifted his gaze to the far bank where straggling pale brown weeds poked up from the early winter landscape, hopeless sprouts with nothing in their future but more of the same. Feathery frost tipped the dead grass, shiny in the breaking dawn.

      “Might as well give it up, Sheba.” Kade reeled in the ten-pound test line, mocking his ambitious tackle. The clerk at the bait and tackle warned him that fish weren’t biting this time of year.

      He slammed the metal tackle box, startling the dog and a red-tailed hawk still napping on a nearby branch. The bird took flight, wings flapping like billows over the calm, cold waters. Sheba looked on, quivering with intense longing. Together, man and dog watched the hawk soar with lazy grace toward the rising sun. Other than a rare car passing on the bridge, all was quiet and peaceful here on the predawn river. The place drew him like a two-ton magnet in those dark hours when sleep, the vicious tease, evaded him.

      Kade sniffed. His nose was cold, but the morning air, with crisp, clean sharpness, invigorated more than chilled. He picked up the scent of someone’s fireplace, a cozy home, he surmised, with two-point-five kids, a Betty Crocker