The Sheriff's Christmas Surprise

“What the—?”

Stunned and surprised but ever mindful of the five-foot nothing, formidable grandmother who had raised him, Rick bit off the curse that shot to his lips. He gazed down at the infant seat and the baby he very nearly had wound up punting across his front yard.

As if sensing the attention, the infant, all waving arms and gurgling noises, swaddled in blue, looked right back up at him. Intense blue eyes met green.

The baby was smiling.

Rick was not.

This had to be somebody’s really poor idea of a joke, Rick thought, although the point of it eluded him.

Immediately, his deputies came to mind. He’d said more than once that nothing ever happened in Forever and his three-man team, which contained one woman, had also heard him say more than once that he was seriously thinking about leaving the small town because the boredom was getting to him.

This was undoubtedly their idea of “excitement.”

Rick glanced around the immediate vicinity. He lived approximately five miles out of town, on a small plot that was barely half an acre. The terrain was as flat as an opened bottle of last week’s ginger ale and if there was someone hanging around to witness his immediate reaction to the baby, they would have been hard-pressed to find a hiding place.

There was no one around.

Rick frowned and squatted down to get a close look at the baby. It didn’t help. He didn’t recognize the infant.

With a sigh, he picked up the infant seat and rose to his feet.

The baby was blowing bubbles, drooling on everything and appeared unfazed by the fact that he was out here, apparently all by himself for who knew how long.

Rick touched the baby’s hand to see if it was cold. The temperature had dropped down to the upper forties during the night. The tiny, curled fist was warm. The baby had to have been dropped off in the past hour.

He scanned the area again. Still no one.

Rick had always had an eye for detail and for faces. His only requirement was that the faces had to belong to someone who was at least two years old. Prior to that, one baby looked pretty much like another to him.

Which was why he didn’t recognize the infant he was holding.

“This someone’s idea of a joke?” he asked out loud, raising his voice.

Only the wind answered.

Holding the infant seat against him with one arm, Rick gingerly felt around the baby to see if a note had been left and slipped in between the baby and the seat. As he disturbed the blanket in his search, an overwhelming, pungent odor rose up.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, his nose wrinkling automatically.

His uninvited visitor made another, louder grunting noise, doing away with any doubts about what was going on. There was a full diaper to be reckoned with.

“Okay, enough’s enough,” Rick called out. “Take your kid back.”

But no one materialized. Whoever had dropped the child off on his doorstep was gone.

Rick’s frown deepened. “You didn’t come with your own set of diapers, did you?” The baby gurgled in response.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Rick muttered, shaking his head. “Hope you like dish towels,” he told the baby as he walked back into the house.

Rick knew without having to raid his medicine cabinet that he had no powder to use on the baby, but because his Mexican grandmother had been adamant about his learning how to cook when he was a boy, he knew he had cornstarch in the pantry. Cornstarch was fairly good at absorbing moisture.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” he told the infant as he appropriated the box of cornstarch off the shelf.

With nothing faintly resembling a diaper and only one set of extra sheets, which he was not about to rip up, Rick was forced to press a couple of clean dish towels into service.

Armed with the towels and box of cornstarch, he laid the baby down on the kitchen table and proceeded to change him.

He had no problem with getting dirty and more than once had sunk his hands into mud when the situation called for it. But when it came to this task, he proceeded gingerly.

And with good reason.

When he opened the diaper, he almost stumbled backward.

“What are you, hollow?” he demanded, stunned at just how much of a “deposit” he found. “How can something so cute be so full of…that?” he asked.

The baby responded by trying to stuff both fists into his mouth.

He was hungry, Rick thought. “Well, no wonder you’re hungry,” he commented. “You emptied everything out.” As quickly as possible, he got rid of the dirty diaper, cleaned up his tiny visitor and put on the clean, makeshift replacement. “Let’s get you back to your mama,” he told the baby, laying him back down into the infant seat and strapping him in.

Within five minutes, Rick was in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, his unwanted companion secured in the backseat, and on his way into town.

“YOU BROUGHT us something to eat?” Deputy Larry Conroy asked, perking up when he glanced toward the man who signed his paychecks as the latter came through the front door.

From where Conroy sat, he could see that the sheriff was carrying something. Given an appetite that never seemed to be sated, nine times out of ten, Larry’s mind immediately went to thoughts of food.

“Not unless you’re a cannibal,” Alma Rodriguez commented, looking around Rick’s arm and into the basket. “What a cute baby.” She eyed her boss and asked, “Whose is it?”

Rick marched over to the desk closest to the door—it happened to belong to his third deputy, Joe Lone Wolf—and set the infant seat down.

Long, lean and lanky, Joe jumped to his feet and looked down at the occupant of the infant seat as if he expected the baby to suddenly turn into a nest of snakes.

“I was just about to ask you three that,” Rick answered, his glance sweeping over the deputies.

“Us?” Larry exchanged glances with the other two deputies, then looked back at his boss. “Why us? What do we have to do with it?” He nodded at the baby, who was obviously “it.”

Hope dwindled that this was just a prank. “Because I figured that one of you left him on my doorstep.”

Alma had a weakness for babies and a biological clock that was ticking louder and louder these days. She was making funny faces at the baby, trying to get the infant to laugh. “It’s a he?” she asked.

“Well, yeah,” Larry said, as if she should have figured that part out quickly. “He’s wearing blue.”

Joe slid back into his chair, pushing it slightly away from his desk and the baby on it. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s a he,” Rick confirmed, his tone indicating that the baby’s gender was not the important issue. “And I want to know where he came from. Any of you ever seen him before?”

Forever had not yet cracked the thousand-occupant mark. Be that as it may, he wasn’t familiar with everyone who called the small town home. In addition, Forever stood right in the path of a well-traveled highway and had more than its share of people passing through. For all he knew, this little guy belonged to someone who had made a pit stop in Forever for a meal and had gotten separated from his family for some reason.