The Carolina night, oppressively warm with the scent of jasmine in the air, is playing its devilish magic, stirring up emotions of yearning and distrust. Mobley Oaks Hall, on the western shore of Spring Island, faces a tidal creek with the Atlantic Ocean due south. A palmetto-strewn lawn planted with tropical blooms slopes down to a mud-crusted beach where moonlit waves glimmer beyond a line of undulating seagrass. If you were to stand on the crushed oyster-shell path leading to the front porch of Mobley Oaks Hall you would see white columns anchoring an antebellum-style house, pale and ghostly, beneath