A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

The next text Pip receives comes at 11:00am the following morning. It gives her instructions to bring her computer and any USBs or hard drives her project is saved on to the tennis club parking lot and to walk 100 paces into the trees. The text states that if she does not tell anyone and comes alone, she will get Barney back. Pip does as she is instructed, and when she arrives at the location, she is told to destroy everything, tell no one what she knows, and stop asking questions about Andie. Pip stomps on her computer and memory sticks, crying as she does so.

More than half an hour passes, and Pip receives no further messages and sees no sign of Barney. Returning home, Pip lies to her father and tells him she was working on her personal essay at a café and that her computer was stolen while she was in the bathroom.

Pip wonders to herself whether she can really give up on finding the truth, knowing that Sal is innocent and that there is a killer in Fairview. She decides she can let it go for Barney’s sake, although she wonders how she will be able to convince Ravi.

Once again, Pip attempts to work on her personal essay when her father interrupts her and tells her someone has found Barney in the river, drowned. Pip cries and screams that this is all her fault.

Ravi visits Pip, telling her he is sorry for her loss and that she does not need to worry about Sal for a while. Pip realizes she must make Ravi give up on the case to keep him safe. She tells him she is done with the project, but he resists: “You can’t stop. You swore to me” (300). Pip continues trying to convince him, and he asks for the photo that proves Sal’s innocence. She tells Ravi her laptop was stolen and that she destroyed the hard copy. Ravi becomes infuriated and leaves, and Pip knows how destroyed he must feel, but she takes comfort in knowing he will be safe.

Ravi visits Pip again the next day, having figured out that someone took Barney as a threat and killed him so that she would stay silent about the truth. She confirms this and shows Ravi the other threatening notes she has received. Pip admits that she still has the hard copy of the photo proving Sal’s innocence, stating she could never have truly destroyed it. She also tells Ravi she still has a backup of the project file in her email. After some debate, Ravi convinces Pip to continue their quest to find the killer.

The two print each entry from Pip’s capstone project and create a murder board, fastening the pages with flat silver pins and making connection lines between them using red string and multicolored thumbtacks. While creating the board, Pip receives a call from Naomi on a number she does not recognize. Naomi explains that her cellphone is broken and that she is using a temporary one. Naomi tells Pip she knows someone who went to Columbia and thinks this person could help Pip with her admissions essay, and Pip is grateful for the offer.

Looking at the murder board, Pip realizes that all of her primary suspects—Nat and Daniel da Silva, Jason Bell, Max Hastings, and Howie Bowers—are all indirectly connected, and any one of them could be the killer.

Pip continues fretting over what to write about for her personal essay and admits she hardly sleeps because there is no time. She goes to her recent calls list and realizes that the number Naomi used to call her the previous day is the same as the one scribbled out in Andie’s planner, which makes her think about Naomi as a suspect. Naomi knew about the hit-and-run, had time to leave Max’s house the night Andie disappeared, and knew where Pip and Cara had camped the night Pip received the first threatening note. Pip then remembers that she set Cara’s computer to record everything coming through the Wards’ printer.