CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Scarlet sat in the back of the small rowboat, rocking in the strong currents of the Hudson River, and wrapped her sweater tighter about her shoulders to ward off the cold breeze coming off the water. She had forgotten how cold the Hudson could be in November; she had also forgotten how strong the tides could be, and she braced herself against the spray, almost like waves in an ocean.

There were too many people crammed in—Maria, Jasmine and Becca, Blake who was rowing, and a couple of his friends—and Scarlet looked out, shivering, not trusting this creaking, weathered boat, and was grateful to see that Bannerman’s Island was fast approaching, hardly thirty yards away.

Scarlet had mixed feelings about coming here. She remembered times in the past when she used to love to come to Bannerman’s, a small, abandoned island in the middle of the Hudson, with its huge crumbling ruin of a castle, a relic of a former time, long abandoned, structurally unsound, overgrown with vines. In fact, the w