A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Ravi apologizes to Pip for having gotten mad at her for defending him. The two take Barney for a walk, and Pip takes a moment to reflect on the bullying she knows Ravi experienced when he was in school.

Pip explains to Ravi that she has four working theories for the case. First, a third party killed Andie, but Sal was somehow involved—like as an accessory—and helped the person and then died by suicide out of guilt. Second, a third party killed Andie, and Sal was not involved, and his suicide was motivated by other factors, such as the stress of the situation. Third, the third-party killer knew Sal was a suspect and killed him to make him look guilty. Fourth, Andie faked her disappearance, killed Sal, and made his death look like a suicide.

Ravi asks Pip if he can be her partner in her investigation because she might be his only chance to find out what really happened. Pip agrees, and Ravi then reveals that he has Sal’s old phone.

Pip hurriedly leads Ravi to her room and begins looking through the phone. According to the phone log, Sal called Andie 112 times on the Saturday he found out she was missing. Ravi explains that the police thought Sal was trying to make himself look innocent by calling Andie’s phone.

Pip continues going through the phone log and discovers that Sal sent Andie a text the day she disappeared that reads, “im not talking to you till youve stopped” (72). He also sent two texts to her the day afterward: “andie just come home everyones worried” and “please just ring someone so we know youre safe” (71).

Pip then reads Sal’s final text, which was sent Tuesday morning to his father. It reads, “it was me. i did it. i’m so sorry” (72). Pip and Ravi agree that the final text looks different from the rest of Sal’s texts due to its punctuation marks. Ravi explains that Sal never used punctuation or capital letters, but the final text has three periods and an apostrophe. They propose that someone else may have sent the text and tried to make it look like Sal had.

Ravi points out another clue to be found on the phone: a note written two days before Andie vanished that says, “009 KKJ.” Both agree it is likely a license plate number. Pip decides that the best course of action is to look further into Andie’s life and determine whether anyone else had a motivation to kill her.

During an interview with Andie’s friend Emma Hutton, Emma says that she had seen Andie and Sal arguing in the days leading up to Andie’s disappearance and that Sal seemed very angry. She also states that Andie was supposed to stay in the Friday night she disappeared to take care of her little sister, Becca, who had been hospitalized for self-harming several weeks before.

Emma explains about how difficult it was being Andie’s friend. Andie’s friendship, she says, was destructive because Andie would go from making a person feel special to using the things that person was most self-conscious about to hurt them.

Capstone Project Log—Entry 11 includes a transcript of Pip’s interview with Chloe Burch, Andie’s other best friend. When Pip asks Chloe about whether Andie and Sal were exclusive, Chloe gives a hesitant, “Um, y-yeah, obviously” (82). Chloe also tells Pip about how much Andie liked to keep secrets and how Andie always seemed to have a lot of money, but Chloe was not sure how she got it. When Pip raises the topic of whether Andie had any tension with her father, Jason, Chloe tells her that is irrelevant, and the interview quickly ends.

Pip wonders in her log notes whether Andie could have been seeing a guy behind Sal’s back. She decides to text Emma while pretending to be Chloe using a pay-as-you-go SIM card. Pip logs the texts in her report. They confirm that Andie was seeing a “secret older guy” whom she could “ruin” if she had wanted to and that Andie knew her father had been having an affair (85). Pip wonders whether Jason could have been giving Andie money to keep her quiet. She also speculates that the secret older man Andie was seeing might have been married and could also have been the source of the money. Pip adds Secret Older Guy to her persons of interest list.

Cara decides she wants to camp for her birthday, and she, Pip, and Lauren assemble a tent in the forest. The girls are joined by their friends Ant Lowe, Zach Chen, and Connor Reynolds, all of whom they have known since childhood.

At night, the group’s conversation turns to telling scary stories. Ant’s story mentions Andie, and he says he was just about to get to the part about Andie’s secret older lover. Pip is indignant that he knows this information. He says that Lauren told him, and Lauren says that Cara told her. Cara apologizes and admits to having told both Lauren and Naomi.

Pip sees a white light flash among the trees, like the glow of a phone screen. She then sees a figure shift in the distance and realizes that someone is watching them.

Connor springs into action, yelling and bounding out toward where Pip saw the figure. Pip takes off after him into the woods and runs around searching for him. She runs into Ant and Connor in the darkness, and Connor says he lost the person. Zach emerges beside them to ask what is going on. The four of them then hear Lauren and Cara scream from back at the campsite. They make their way back through the forest to find the girls terrified at having been left alone.

When Pip crawls into her sleeping bag, she feels the crinkle of paper against her right foot. When she pulls out the paper, she discovers it is a note reading, “Stop digging, Pippa” (97). Furious, Pip asks the boys whether they think this is some kind of joke. They say they do not know what she is talking about, but Pip is unconvinced. She attempts to sleep, but the words from the note run through her mind.