I wasn’t as surprised as she seemed to think I’d be. “You’ve kept tabs on the family?”

She nodded. “Every time we come through Colleton County, I stop at the library and the courthouse. I’m real good at searching legal documents.”

For the last few minutes, she’d been fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”

I shook my head as she lit up, hungrily drawing the smoke into her lungs. “You should have contacted us.”

“Why? Y’all never contacted me, did you?”

“But we tried,” I said. “Least Daddy did. But it was as if you and Carol had vanished off the face of the earth. Then after your grandparents died and the farm changed hands, I guess you just slipped out of our memory.”

Saying those words jarred a more recent memory. “In court you said you owned property here in the county. The farm?”

“Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it?” She flicked ashes into the tray beside her. “My Grandpa Hatcher wanted to make sure we’d never get a penny out of him and he willed the place to his only sister, who willed it to her son Mack. Mack got killed in a car wreck about a week after she died and guess who was his last living relative? So, yeah, I’ve been paying taxes on it for three years now.”

It occurred to me that Daddy must be starting to lose it a little. In years past, he’d have known about this the minute Tally took title to the farm. Anything that touched his family touched him, and since Mother had been so sure that Carol’s baby was his granddaughter, he’d have tried to keep his feelers out. Somehow, this had slipped past him.

“We’ve been fixing the place up a little every time we pass through,” said Tally. “The house isn’t much, but at least Aunt Nancy put in plumbing. And the outbuildings are solid, okay? We’re using some of the barns for storage.”

“Storage?”

“Yeah. Arn and Braz? They buy up stuff when we’re on the road and we cart it back to Gibtown when the season’s over. We sell it on eBay or flea markets in the wintertime.” She sighed. “Every time Braz went off and bid on a storage locker or bought something at a salvage auction, he thought he was going to hit the jackpot. Score big. Poor kid. He wanted to be rich so bad.”

As she spoke, I remembered that she’d said she never knew the biological father’s name. “Major Bryant told me your son’s name was Hartley?”

“My first husband,” she said. “He sort of took me under his wing the week I joined the carnival. He owned a couple of grab wagons, okay? Let me wash dishes for my keep and made me go to school in the winter. When I got pregnant, he already had the colon cancer. Told me it I’d stay and nurse him, he’d marry me and say the baby was his so we could have his name and Social Security. I was eighteen when Hartley died. His Social Security and his grab joints kept us going till I met Arnold and I earned every penny of it, okay? But he was good to me. Gave me books. Made me get my GED.”