PIPPA FITZ-AMOBI
10/14/19
CAPSTONE PROJECT LOG—ENTRY 31
He’s innocent.
This project is no longer the hopeful conjecture it started as. No longer me indulging my gut instinct because Sal was kind to me when I was small and hurting. No longer Ravi hoping against hope that his brother wasn’t a monster. It’s real. No shred of “maybe”/“possibly”/“allegedly” left. Sal Singh did not kill Andie Bell. And he did not kill himself.
If a villain can be made, then he can be unmade. Two teenagers were murdered in Fairview five and a half years ago, and Ravi and I hold the clues to finding the real killer.
I went to meet Ravi in the park after school, and we talked for more than three hours, well past dusk. He was angry when I told him why Sal’s friends took his alibi away. A quiet kind of angry. It’s not fair, nothing about any of this is fair. But Naomi never meant to hurt Sal—it’s clear from her face, clear from the way she’s tiptoed through life since. She acted out of fear and I can understand that. Ravi does, too, though he’s not sure he can forgive her.
His face fell when I said I didn’t know whether the photo was enough for the police to reopen the case; I’d bluffed to get Max and Naomi to talk. The police might think I doctored the image and refuse to apply for a warrant to check Max’s profile. Max deleted the photo already, of course. Ravi thinks I’d have more credibility with the police than him, but I’m not so sure; a teenage girl going on about photo angles and tiny white numbers on a phone screen, especially when the evidence against Sal is so solid. Not to mention Daniel da Silva on the force, shutting me down.
The hardest part was when I told him I wanted to protect Naomi. I explained that they are my family, Cara and Naomi both sisters to me, and Cara is innocent. It would kill me to do this to her, to make her lose her sister after her mom too. I promised Ravi we didn’t need Sal to have an alibi to prove his innocence; we just have to find the real killer. He pushed back a little, as I would have expected, so we came to a deal: three weeks. Three more weeks to find the killer or solid evidence against a suspect. If we have nothing after that deadline, Ravi and I will go to the police with the photo and see if they’ll take it seriously.
So I have just three weeks to find the killer, or Naomi’s and Cara’s lives get blown apart. Was it wrong of me to ask Ravi to do this, to wait when he’s waited so long already? I’m torn, between the Wards and the Singhs and what’s right. I don’t even know what’s right anymore—everything is so muddled. I’m not sure I’m the good girl I once thought I was. I’ve lost her along the way.
And from the persons of interest list, we have now narrowed it down to five suspects. I’ve taken Naomi off the list. My reasons for suspecting her—the MIA thing and her being so awkward when answering questions about Sal—have been explained away.
I made a diagram to recap all the suspects:
Along with the note and text I got, I now have another lead to the killer: the fact that they knew about the hit-and-run. First up, and most obviously, Max knew about it because he was the one who did it. He could have pretended to threaten himself along with his friends so he could pin Andie’s murder on Sal.
But, as Naomi said, Max has always partied a lot. Drinking and taking drugs. He could have let it slip about the hit-and-run to someone he knew, like Nat da Silva or Howie Bowers. Or maybe even Andie Bell, who then, in turn, could have told any of the names above. Daniel da Silva was a working police officer who responded to traffic accidents; maybe he put two and two together? Or could one of them have been on the same road that night and seen it happen? It’s feasible, then, that any of the five could have learned about the accident and used it to their advantage. But Max remains the strongest option in that respect.
I know Max has an alibi for the majority of the Andie disappearance window, but I do not trust him. As long as he intercepted Andie before 12:45, when she was expected to pick her parents up, it’s still possible. Or maybe he went to help finish something that Howie started? He said he didn’t leave his house, but he didn’t really have to be honest with me. I’m in a bit of a catch-22 here: I can’t protect Naomi without simultaneously protecting Max, and I think he knows that. Naomi said she hasn’t considered him a friend since the accident and the alibi thing, but she was scared and felt like she had to pretend because of this terrible secret they shared. Well, at least she’ll be staying away from him now, which is good because I’m almost certain he’s dangerous.
Another new lead I have is that the killer somehow had access to the phone numbers of Max, Naomi, Millie, and Jake (as well as mine). But this doesn’t really narrow it down. Max obviously had them, and Howie could have had access that way. Nat da Silva probably had all their numbers, especially as she was good friends with Naomi; Daniel could have gotten them through her. Jason Bell may seem like the outlier in this matter, BUT if he did kill Andie and had her phone, she probably had each of their numbers saved on it.
I’m running out of time and I haven’t narrowed anything down. I need to try harder, because the clock is against me now. AND I still need to write my essay.
Pip unlocked the front door and Barney bounded down the hall to escort her to the living room.
“Hello, pickle,” her dad said as she popped her head in. “We only just beat you back. I’m about to sort out some dinner for Mom and me; Josh ate at Sam’s house. Did you eat at Cara’s?”
“Yeah,” she said. They’d eaten, but they hadn’t talked much. Cara had been quiet all week at school. Pip understood; she didn’t really know what to say either. Sorry? or I promise I’ll fix this? After Max left on Sunday, Cara and Naomi had asked her who she thought the killer was. She didn’t tell them anything, just warned Naomi to stay away from Max. She couldn’t risk sharing Andie’s secrets with them in case that came hand in hand with threats from the killer.
“How was parents’ night?” Pip asked.
“Pretty good,” her mom said, patting Josh’s head. “Getting better in science and math, aren’t you, Josh?”
Josh nodded, assembling Lego bricks on the coffee table.
“Although Miss Speller did say you have a proclivity for being the class clown.” Her dad threw a mock-serious face in Josh’s direction.
“I wonder where he gets that from,” Pip said, throwing the same face right back at him.
He chuckled. “The sass.”
“OK, I’m going to get a few hours’ work done before bed.” She stepped back into the hallway and toward the stairs.
“Oh, sweetie,” her mom sighed, “you work too hard.”
“There’s no such thing,” Pip said, waving from the stairs.
On the landing she stopped just outside her bedroom. The door was open slightly, which jarred with Pip’s memory of this morning; Josh sprinting down the upstairs hall, squirting two bottles of their dad’s aftershave, yelling “Chemical attack!” Pip had made sure to close her door behind her so her room wouldn’t forever smell like Pour Homme. Or maybe that had been yesterday morning? She hadn’t been sleeping well and the days were sticking to each other.
“Has someone been in my room?” she called downstairs.
“No, we just got in,” her mom replied.
Pip went inside and dumped her backpack on the bed. She walked over to her desk and knew with only half a glance that something wasn’t right. Her laptop was open, the screen tilted back. Pip always, always closed the lid when she left it for the day. She hit the power button, and as it whirred back to life she noticed that the neat stack of printouts beside her computer had been fanned out. One had been picked out and placed on top of the pile.
It was the photograph. The evidence of Sal’s alibi. And it wasn’t where she’d left it.
Her laptop sang two welcome notes and loaded the home screen. It was just as she’d left it: the Word document with her capstone project in the task bar beside a minimized Chrome tab. She clicked into her log, which opened on the page below her diagram.
Pip gasped.
Below her final words someone had typed: YOU NEED TO STOP THIS, PIPPA.
Over and over again. Hundreds of times. Enough to fill four full pages.
Pip’s heart drummed beneath her skin. She drew her hands away from the keyboard. The killer had been here, in her room. Touching her things. Looking through her research.
Inside her home.
She pushed away from the desk and bounded downstairs.
“Um, Mom,” she said, trying to speak normally over the terror in her voice, “did anyone come over to the house today?”
“I don’t know, I’ve been at work all day and went straight to Josh’s parents’ night. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” Pip said, improvising. “I ordered a book and thought it would turn up. Um…oh, and there was a story going around school today. A couple of people’s houses have been broken into; they think they’re using people’s spare keys to get in. Maybe we shouldn’t keep ours out until they’re caught?”
“Oh really?” her mom said, looking up at her. “Yeah, I guess we shouldn’t, then.”
“I’ll get it,” Pip said, trying not to skid as she hurried for the front door.
She pulled it open and a blast of night air cooled her burning face. She bent down and peeled back the outside doormat. The key was sitting not in, but just next to its original imprint in the dirt. Pip grabbed it, the icy metal stinging her fingers.
She lay under her duvet, arrow-straight. There was a scraping sound somewhere in the house. Was someone trying to get inside? Or was it just the tree that scuffed against her parents’ window?
A thud from the front. Pip jumped. A neighbor’s car door or someone trying to break in?
She got out of bed for the sixteenth time and went to the window. Was someone out there watching her? She waited for a sign of movement, for a ripple of darkness to shift and become a person.
Pip let the curtain fall and got back into bed. She shivered, watching the clock turn to three o’clock and on.
The wind howled and rattled her window, and Pip’s heart jumped to her throat. She threw the duvet off and tiptoed across the landing to Josh’s room. He was sound asleep, his face lit up by his nightlight.
Pip crept over to the foot of his bed and climbed under the covers beside him.
She lay there, listening to his deep breaths, letting his warmth thaw her. Her eyes crossed as she stared ahead, transfixed by the soft blue light.
Josh would be safe, if she was here to watch him.