A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Pip joins Cara and Naomi to carve pumpkins for Halloween and quickly learns that the old SIM card Naomi used to call Pip actually belongs to their father, Mr. Ward. She questions why Andie would have had his number written in her planner and remembers she referred to him as “an asshole” the week she disappeared. Pip considers that Mr. Ward might have simply been offering to tutor Andie, explaining why she had his number.

Pip asks Cara if she can get her laptop from her bedroom. She heads upstairs and grabs the laptop and then goes into Mr. Ward’s study, finding the option to see what has been printed through the computer’s control panel. Pip scrolls back to the date the note was put in her locker and sees that Mr. Ward printed something that day. She reprints the document and sees that it reads, “This is your final warning, Pippa. Walk away” (319).

It dawns on Pip that Mr. Ward is the anonymous threatener: “Elliot Ward was the killer. Andie’s killer. Sal’s. Barney’s” (320). Making her way back downstairs, Pip asks whether Mr. Ward is tutoring. Cara responds that he tutors Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he probably just had to stay late at school. The girls hear Mr. Ward’s car pull up, and Pip panics, thinking that she needs to leave immediately. Before she can, however, Mr. Ward walks into the room smiling and offering them all Halloween candy.

Pip’s parents leave to take Josh trick-or-treating, and she immediately texts Ravi to come to her house. He is in disbelief about Mr. Ward when he arrives. Pip explains that Mr. Ward has no alibi for the night Andie disappeared because both Cara and Naomi were out of the house, and Mr. Ward told Pip that he had called in sick to work on the day Sal died. Ravi asks if Mr. Ward is the secret older man Andie was seeing at the Ivy House Inn, and Pip tells him that Andie would have been able to ruin him if so. The two still cannot determine, however, how Mr. Ward could have known about Max’s hit-and-run in order to threaten the group into lying to the police about Sal’s alibi.

Pip suggests that instead of tutoring three times a week, Mr. Ward is actually visiting Andie, who is alive and being kept somewhere by him. She turns on the Find My Friends app on their phones so that they can share their locations and states that if she can find a way to leave her phone in his car, they will have a tracking device to determine whether Mr. Ward is really tutoring.

Pip fake-limps with Cara, having pretended she tripped coming down the stairs at school. Cara has offered her a ride home, putting into motion Pip’s plan to leave her phone in Mr. Ward’s car. Mr. Ward soon joins them, and on the way to her house, Pip puts her phone deep under the car’s backseat. Mr. Ward says he will be tutoring in Stamford that day, so Pip knows if he does not head in that direction, he is hiding something.

At home, Pip’s mother reminds her that the early admission application deadline is at midnight. Ravi stops by, and he and Pip check the location of her phone using the Find My Friends app. They soon notice that Mr. Ward is not heading in the direction of Stamford and is instead driving to New Canaan, where the Wards lived before moving to Fairview. Pip sees him pull up to a house on Gravesend Road and says she will ask Cara if this was where the Wards used to live.

Ravi then tells Pip he will not let her “throw away Columbia for this” (333), telling her to focus on her personal essay. Pip opens a blank Word document and writes:

What’s wrong with me? […] I might seem like the ideal student: homework always in early, every extra credit and extracurricular I can get my hands on, the good girl and the high achiever. But I realized something just now: it’s not ambition, not entirely. Because I don’t know who I am when I’m not working, when I’m not focused on or totally consumed by a task. Who am I between the projects and the assignments, when there’s nothing to do? I haven’t found her yet and it scares me. Maybe that’s why, for my senior capstone project this year, I decided to solve a murder (334).

Pip attends the winter carnival with her friends, where Cara returns Pip’s phone to her, stating, “You were right, you had somehow left it in Dad’s car” (336). Pip also tells her friends that she got her personal essay in before the deadline the night before. Pip lies, telling Cara that her mother is showing a house on Gravesend Road in New Canaan and asking if that is where Cara used to live. Cara confirms it was house number 42 and tells Pip that her dad sold the house years ago.

Leaving the carnival, Pip briefly runs into Mr. Ward, and he asks her where Cara is because he needs to drop her at home before running to Target. Pip points behind her and nervously excuses herself. She figures that Mr. Ward is going to the Target near New Canaan and that he will be going to the house on Gravesend Road afterward. Pip lies to Ravi about heading to his house for dinner and instead puts the address for 42 Gravesend Road into her map app.