Above them, it was already getting dark. Mateo wished he’d asked Peter what time it was. How long had it been since he’d woken up from that crazy nightmare out there on the lakeshore? Mateo had lost track of night and day and everything in between.

As soon as Peter was a safe distance way, Felicia’s head whipped around toward Mateo. “Now do you believe me?”

“Not really, no,” Mateo said.

Felicia sighed. Up at the house the spotlights had come on, illuminating it under the dark sky. The building looked like something out of Gone with the Wind. Or maybe House on Haunted Hill.

“It makes sense, about the murders coming in groups of three,” Felicia said. “There’s the one story from not that long ago, about the football players? Two guys on the team died. They were struck by lightning. Another guy was hit too. He lived, but barely. All in one football season back in the eighties.”

“Getting struck by lightning isn’t murder,” Mateo said. Though it was really disturbing, now that he thought about it, what had happened to those three guys. It didn’t seem like something that could’ve been real. It seemed . . . unnatural.

Mateo glanced up toward the far end of campus. Dunsinane Field, where the football games were held, was on the other side of the hill. They could just see the tips of the goalposts from where they stood.

Felicia had said something about the ghosts messing with your head. Lily’s head sure seemed like it had been messed with. Could something have happened to Brandon too? Could a ghost have made Brandon do something he wouldn’t have done otherwise?

No. That was ridiculous. There weren’t any ghosts, and even if there were, they couldn’t make you do anything. Mateo had been dreaming about La Llorona for weeks now, and he hadn’t pushed anyone out a window.

Maria. She’d stood too much to gain from getting Delilah out of the picture. But that didn’t explain Brandon.

Maria wouldn’t kill her best friend. She wasn’t that much of a psycho.

Unless something really had messed with her head.

“We’ve only had one death so far,” Felicia said. “There could be two, if Delilah dies. So there’s at least one more to go for the pattern to fit.”

“You’re talking crazy, Fee,” he said. “There isn’t any pattern. All we know is there’s an attempted murderer in the senior class, and apparently you and I are the only ones who want to bother stopping her.”

At the top of the hill, the spotlights went out. So did every other light in the house. The power was out again.