Wild Oranges

John Woolfolk and his wife are riding down a country lane in a horse-drawn wagon. They have an accident, and while John survives unharmed, his wife is killed. Disillusioned, he adopts a reclusive life on the sea, sailing along the Atlantic coast in his schooner Yankee. One afternoon, the men steer the Yankee across a bar into an inlet along the Georgia coast. The inlet is inhabited by Litchfield Stope (the master of the once-grand house that sits on the inlet) his granddaughter Millie, and Nicholas, a "homicidal maniac