The elderly man mopped his brow with a burgundy handkerchief before stuffing it back into a shirt pocket.  The humidity here did not agree with his asthma at all.  Corridors he passed through had tall arched ceilings.  Pillars carved entirely of granite were a common enough sight in the old plantation era estates.  If these walls could talk, Raymond Archibald Cranston thought in wonder.  What would they have to say about his birth mother?  He had grown up in an orphanage in Key West, Florida and had been adopted at the age of seven by a minister and his wife who had been vacationing in the Keys. 

The Cranston’s had whisked him away to a climate in the southwest a little less God forsaken and raised him up with good Christian values.  Dead now twenty years, the C...

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