Not One of Us(51)

Was it possible Ardy still lived in Gulfport? The town was only about an hour’s drive from the bayou. His name was unusual; surely there couldn’t be that many people named Ardy Ensley in Mississippi. On a whim, I entered his name in a search engine and came up with fewer than half a dozen hits, three of which were old obituaries. I read those first, but they were written long before my Ardy was even born. His was an old-fashioned southern name, years out of popular use. On the next-to-last lead, I hit gold. A Mr. Ardy Ensley of Gulfport owned a construction company that had recently completed a strip mall project in Harrison County.

Pretending to be an electrical subcontractor, I called and arranged a meeting with him to discuss a commercial building project. A mere two hours later, I strode into the office of Ensley Construction sporting an attitude of assertive confidence to mask my extreme nervousness.

What is the worst that could happen? I asked myself. If he got angry and tossed me out on my ear, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe I’d at least garner a scrap of information that could prove useful to Tegan. Something that would make her want to officially interview Ensley for herself.

I sat at the conference table in the empty room while I waited for Ensley to show. He appeared to have done well for himself after leaving Bayou Enigma. The table was polished mahogany, the floor a plush carpet. On one wall, several mounted photographs featured a man I assumed must be Ardy Ensley. In them, he wore a hard hat and business suit, appearing at several groundbreaking sites with politicians, who also held shovels, decked in hard hats and suits. As if those men had ever done a day of manual labor in their lives.

My eyes caught sight of a credenza that held a few personal photographs, and I got up and walked over. There was a handsome silver-haired woman in pearls, Ardy holding a baby in a pink blanket, and a family photograph of Ardy with the same silver-haired woman and three adults who all bore the unmistakable stamp of family with the similar slope of their noses and large mouths full of shiny white teeth.

I lifted the group family photo and examined it closely. While my aunt had been left grieving after Jackson’s death, slowly losing touch with reality, Ardy had evidently moved on with his life, creating a new family and business. By all appearances, a happier family and a more successful business than the one he’d abandoned in Enigma. Adding a final insult to injury, he’d skipped town with no advance notice, leaving behind three workers unpaid for their last two weeks of labor and a devastated, confused wife.

I reckoned I should be glad for Ardy that the tragedy hadn’t wrecked his life like it had his ex-wife’s. But all I could picture was Aunt Tressie sitting in her recliner at Magnolia Oaks, a ratty afghan wrapped over her thin legs, gazing forlornly out the room’s small window with its view of the wild bayou wetlands.

“J. T. Jenkins?”

I jumped at the voice behind me and spun around, still clutching the photo.

I’d been expecting a big, burly man with eighteen-inch biceps and a tan, weathered face, but Ardy was nothing like that. At five feet eight inches, he was only an inch taller than me. A few wrinkles creased the sides of his eyes and forehead, but he appeared at least a decade younger than Aunt Tressie. His face and arms were lightly tanned, but the shade was uniform and subtle, likely the result of a self-tanning spray rather than hard labor in the sun. The man evidently took pride in his appearance—probably to please his second wife, I imagined, with a small pang of bitterness on my aunt’s account.

He regarded me with a raised brow. Clearly, I hadn’t been what he was expecting either. When I’d made the appointment, I’d lied about my name and used vague details about my nonexistent company so he couldn’t check me out ahead of time.

I raised the photograph in my hand. “Your family?”

He smiled smoothly and slid into the seat at the head of the table, a predictable power move for potential business negotiations. “My wife, Lonnie, and our kids, David, Linda, and Beth. The beautiful baby in the other photo is my granddaughter, Tiffany.”

“Good-looking bunch,” I said, placing the picture back on the credenza and taking a seat on Ardy’s right side.

“My pride and joy,” he answered, flashing the familial grin that bared a mouthful of teeth. He folded his hands on the tabletop and waited expectantly. A gold wedding band gleamed on his left hand. So much for preliminary chitchat. The man was ready to get down to business.

Under the table, I dug my fingernails into my palms, the pain a distraction from my nervousness. It was showtime. I’d rehearsed my opening over and over on the drive to Gulfport.

“The initials J. T. stand for Jori Trahern,” I began. His eyes remained blank and questioning. My name meant nothing to him. “I’m from Bayou Enigma.”

That name he did recognize. His body jolted as though he’d been delivered an electric shock. “Jori Trahern,” he said slowly. “Of course. You’re Oatha Jean’s granddaughter.”

“And at one time your niece, though I was only two or three when you left.”

Ardy’s blue eyes grew cold and distant. “Why are you here?”

“Sorry for the deception,” I said. “I couldn’t get a meeting with you unless it was a business appointment, so . . .”

“What do you want with me?”

“To talk to you about your son. Jackson.”

The man went pale beneath his tan. He rose on unsteady feet. “I’ve got nothing to say. You have no right lying your way in to see me and then dredging up the past.” His voice turned hard; each syllable spewed at me like chunks of gravel. “Get out.”