Damage Control by J. A. Jance Page A

“Here’s your boy. I’ll head out, and give you some privacy.”
    Eleanor let herself out the back door while Joanna turned her attention to Dennis. Did he look like her? The hair, yes. Eyes? No. How he looked when he slept? If that was anything like the way Joanna looked when she slept, it was news to her. But what really puzzled her as she sat there playing with her son was what was going on with his grandmother. Something wasn’t right with Eleanor. Yes, she had always wanted her daughter to be able to be a stay-at-home mom, but this seemed to be more than that. What it was exactly, Joanna couldn’t fathom.
    Half an hour later, when Joanna was in the nursery and finishing cleaning up what Dennis’s father liked to refer to as “a complete wardrobe malfunction,” Butch appeared in the doorway. He was holding a FedEx box, sealing it shut, and looking enormously pleased with himself.
    “Done!” he announced. “If I leave right now, maybe I can catch up with the FedEx truck as it comes back from Douglas.”
    “You can’t e-mail it?” Joanna asked. “Isn’t that what you did last time?”
    “That was for the editorial letter. For that one they want an electronic file. For the review of the copyediting it has to be hard copy.”
    “Well, do it, then,” Joanna said. “Let’s get it out of here. Maybe we can both take the rest of the weekend off.”
    Butch came over and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
    “Mom says we’re out of laundry detergent,” Joanna said.
    Butch nodded distractedly. “Maybe not right back, then,” he amended. “I’ll stop by the store on the way and pick up some detergent and a few other things we need. It’ll go a lot faster if Ido that on my own. When I’m trying to run errands, buckling the kid in and out of his car seat is a major pain in the butt. It takes forever. Come to think of it, I may stop by the hardware store while I’m out, too. I need some new locks for the other house. Having new keys made isn’t something that’ll be simple if I have Dennis along.”
    Joanna remembered very well how doing anything at all with a relatively new baby in tow was always much more complicated than doing the same thing on her own. She picked Dennis up and followed Butch into the kitchen.
    “I’m sorry if Mom was in your way while you were trying to work,” she apologized as he pocketed his car keys.
    “In my way?” Butch returned. “Are you kidding? Your mother was a regular lifesaver today. I never would have finished working on the manuscript if she hadn’t been here looking after the baby. And she’s done all the laundry, too. Amazing.”
    Joanna found Butch’s unstinting gratitude about Eleanor almost as baffling as her mother’s bizarre behavior. “So you don’t mind that she showed up uninvited?”
    “Not at all. And she wasn’t uninvited, by the way. I’m pretty sure Jenny told her she was more than welcome to come pitch in. She did and she was—welcome, that is.”
    With that Butch took his manuscript and headed for his Subaru. Joanna stowed Dennis in his swing—one of the new battery-operated ones that was not only self-swinging, it also came equipped with lights and music—all of which Dennis seemed to enjoy.
    Having him occupied for a time gave Joanna a chance to put away all that folded laundry. In the process she noticed, with some consternation, that the usually brimming ironing basketwas also empty. In the course of several frenetic hours, Joanna’s mother had not only managed to look after the baby, she had also done all the laundry, ironing included. If Eleanor was burning off that kind of excess energy, Joanna suspected George Winfield was in far more trouble than he knew.
    Working in fits and starts, she eventually managed to open her briefcase and spread two days’ worth of accumulated paperwork out on the dining room table. She was still attempting to sort that—not easy with a baby on one