The coast town of Parnellton had the customary languorous physical attributes of the low country. It was seasonally odorous with jasmine and magnolias, brazen with the fulsomeness of its well-publicized azaleas, and atmospherically sinister with its omnipresent shredded-shrouds effect of Spanish moss.
Its population proper were employees of the furniture works where cypress wood was fashioned into garden and patio pieces of artistically rigid discomfort. There were the outlying plantation houses, for the most part tenanted by end-of-the-line descendants who were putting the best face possible on a dispiriting indigence. Otherwise the town’s sole claim to notability lay in its inn.
This inn, the Wynstable, had been opened forty years ago as a distinguished and frighteningly expensive retr
