As Good As Dead (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #3)

by Holly Jackson

Team Ravi and Pip.

Two younger sisters, carrying around a ghost wherever they went.

Five years apart and they’d never met, yet here she was, carrying Andie around in her chest. Two dead girls walking, more alike than Pip could ever have realized.

Team Ravi and Pip, who can talk about normal things like new college bed sheets

and movie theater times and tentative, half-shy discussions of the future. Their future.

Because DT was the origin. The end and the beginning. The monster in the dark, the creator, the source. Everything that had happened traced right back to him. All of it.

Andie Bell knew who DT was and she was terrified, so she sold drugs for Howie Bowers to save up money to escape, to get far away from Fairview. She sold Rohypnol to Max Hastings, who then used those drugs to rape her little sister, Becca. Andie pursued Elliot Ward in her desperate plan to escape to Yale with Sal. Elliot thought he accidentally killed Andie, so he murdered Sal to cover it up, Ravi’s brother dead

in the woods. But Elliot didn’t kill Andie, not really; it was Becca Bell, too angry and shocked at her sister’s role in her own tragedy that she froze and let Andie die from her head injury, choking on her own vomit. Five years went by and then Pip came along, uncovered all those truths. Elliot in prison, Becca in prison though she ...

in prison. Howie told his cellmate that he knew the real Child Brunswick. The cellmate told his cousin, who told a friend, who told a friend, who put the rumor online. Charlie Green read that rumor and came to Fairview. Layla Mead, wearing the face of Stella Chapman. Jamie Reynolds missi...

Three different stories, but one interconnected knot. And in the center of that writhing knot, grinning at her from the dark, was DT.

Pip was lucky. So lucky. Why hadn’t she ever stopped to think about how lucky she was? All those people who cared about her, whether she deserved them or not.

She was never going to see them again. Any of them. Not Ravi’s lopsided smile or his ridiculous laugh, or any of the hundred ways he had of telling her he loved her. Never hear him call her Sarge again. Never see her family, not her friends. All those last moments with all of them, and Pip hadn’t known those were her final goodbyes.

He was her best thing, and now she would always be the worst thing that had

happened to him. A pain in his chest he’d never forget.

“Fuck that less than one percent. You’re Pippa Fricking Fitz-Amobi. My little Sarge. Pippus Maximus. And there’s nothing you can’t do.”

It was Jason Bell.

“You must have been so scared,” he said quietly. “I was,”

Pip felt her eyes prickle, a catch in her throat. She thought she’d never see them again. Never smile with them, or cry, or laugh, never grow old as her parents grew older, their traditions becoming hers, like the way her dad made mashed potatoes, or the

way her mom decorated the tree at Christmas. Never see Josh grow into a man, or know what his forever-voice sounded like, or what made him happy. All those moments, a lifetime of them, big and small. Pip had lost them, and now she hadn’t. Not if she could pull this off.

Pip felt her eyes filling up as she glanced between the Reynolds brothers. Two faces she’d known as far as memory would

take her, two players in the history of who she was.

“Don’t try to make me feel bad for you,”

“You evil piece of shit.”

Because it was late at night, in that in-between time when too-late became too-early, and Pip Fitz-Amobi was dragging a dead body.

“Yeah,” Pip whispered, looking down at him. Max Hastings. Her cornerstone. The upturned mirror by which she defined herself, everything he was and everything

she wasn’t. “It sucks when someone puts something in your drink and then ruins your life, huh?”

A normal, family dinner, except it wasn’t. But none of them knew it was really a goodbye. Pip had been so lucky. Why hadn’t she stopped to think about that before? She should have thought it every single day. And now she had to give it all up. All of them. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want this. She wanted to fight against this, rage against this.

She pulled up outside the Singhs’ house, remembering that naive girl who’d knocked on this door so long ago, introducing

herself by telling Ravi she didn’t

think his brother was a killer. So different from the person standing here now, and yet they’d always share one thing: Ravi. He was her be...

“It was my choice and I chose you. You’re

not going anywhere,”

She closed her eyes and made a new silent promise to him, because he had chosen her and she had chosen him: they were going to get away with it.

Cara Ward, more a sister than a friend, her constant, her crutch, and that familiar look on her face helped loosen the knot in Pip’s gut.

suppose if you were ever involved in anything like this,” he said, the after-laugh smile still on his face, “you’d know exactly how to get away with it.”

We can find each other again, I promise. If that’s still what you want.”

I love you. I can’t…I can’t. You’re my Pip and I’m your Ravi. We’re a team. I don’t want this.”

She’d be kinder to her mom, who had only ever wanted the best for her. Pip should have listened more, she should have understood. Pip had taken her for granted: her strength, the roll of her eyes, and the reason for her pancakes, and she’d never do that again. They were a team, they had been from the start, from her very

first breath, and if Pip could have her life back, they would be a team again, until her mom’s last. Holding hands, old skin on older skin.

And if he did wait, if he did wait for her and the verdict went their way, Pip would work every day to be the kind of person who deserved Ravi Singh.