“Which Mr. Knott?” she’d asked, abruptly remembering that Andrew was hardly alone in possessing that name in this county.

“Mr. Kezzie Knott,” he’d answered.

“Oh,” she’d said, confused by such conflicting emotions.

If Andrew wanted to pay for the funeral, it could mean he accepted that she was his daughter. Unless, she thought angrily, it meant he thought he could make up for a lifetime of denial with a one-time check. But that it was her grandfather...? Well, Deborah did say he’d tried to find her for years.

As she slipped between Polly’s Plate Pitch and the Rope Climb to get onto the midway, Tally realized that she was smiling at the thought of having a moonshiner and a bootlegger for a grandfather. Over the years, passing through Dobbs on the way to gigs further north, she’d always made Arn stop here. While he loaded up on cheap cigarettes for bribing ride jockeys and greasing Yankee palms, she would spend the afternoon in the courthouse. Once she discovered that the library directly across the street also housed genealogical data, she started dropping in there first. The Colleton County Heritage Center on the second floor was just full of goodies. Its staff of volunteer genealogists seemed maniacally dedicated to documenting everything from obituaries and gravestones (which is how she learned that Susan Knott had died years earlier) to clipping news articles and filing them in folders that were open to anyone who wandered in.

A catchall Knott family folder was like dipping into a family scrapbook. Any time any Knott made the newspapers, someone had filed the article. Here was where she’d read about her stepmother (“April Knott Named Colleton Teacher of the Year”), her uncles (“Knott Brothers Pool Labor and Equipment to Control Rising Farm Expenses”), and her cousins and half siblings (“Cotton Grove Man Has Truck Damaged by Deer” and “Area Youths Charged with Vandalism”). Judge Deborah Knott had recently acquired a folder of her own with clippings about her career.

Finding a folder for Keziah “Kezzie” Knott had interested her the most, though. It held yellowed clippings that went back to his arrest, trial, and eighteen-month incarceration for income tax evasion forty-five or fifty years ago. It didn’t take much reading between the “alleged” and “rumored” lines to understand that this was the only way the Feds could get at a man everyone knew controlled the making and selling of illegal whiskey in the area. The crossroads gas and grocery store he’d bankrolled had been the equivalent of a game so slickly gaffed that nothing could be pinned on the agent. The later expunging of his record was just butter on the popcorn.

Ever since she’d read that, Tally had wished she could have known him while she was growing up instead of Grandpa Hatcher. Unless Kezzie Knott was a huge hypocrite, he wouldn’t have cursed her birth or scorned her for the life she’d made for herself.