Into the Water

Josh and his family get ready to move to Devon. Josh doesn’t believe that Lena killed Mark, though there are rumors at school to that effect. He acknowledges that the events around Katie and Mark will never make sense to him. 

Louise says goodbye to Katie as she gets ready to leave her house. Lena gives Louise Nel’s “manuscript, the pictures, the notes, a USB with all the computer files” (370) of The Drowning Pool and tells Louise to do as she wants with it. Louise resolves to be more kind, admitting that no matter how she feels about Lena, Lena really did love Katie.

Nickie gets ready to leave Beckford as well, observing that Patrick is in jail and Sean has left town. Nickie is surprised to find out that Nel left her £10,000.

Erin, having left Beckford already, comes back to visit. She has been looking for Sean but is unable to find him; Sean has not been to visit his father either. Erin has been dealing with fallout from the mishandling of both Katie’s and Nel’s cases—regarding both how Mark disappeared and how Sean was allowed to work Nel’s case despite his personal involvement with her. Erin says that Patrick’s story about “tearing” Nel’s bracelet from her wrist rings untrue, as there were “no signs of any struggle whatsoever” (374). Visiting the river, Erin feels as though Nel, Katie, and Lauren’s stories are still unfinished. 

Helen is in a new town, having left Beckford with Sean, who disappeared from their new home shortly after they arrived. While Helen admits that Patrick was wrong to murder Nel, she understands why he did it, though she has nightmares of Patrick drowning her cat. 

Jules, now living in London and taking care of Lena, observes how Lena is very similar to Nel. She observes: “I could not be a sister to you, but I will try to be a mother to your child” (378). She takes comfort in knowing that Patrick is “paying for what he did to his wife, and to his son, and to you” (379). 

Patrick regularly dreams of murdering Erin and Jules. He laments Helen and Sean’s abandonment of him in the wake of his confession, insisting that, “everything he had done, the stories he had told and the life he had constructed, it had all been for Sean” (380). 

Sean feels lost, as though he does not know himself. His memories of the night of his mother’s death are fractured: scrambled bits of things he does remember, things he was told happened, and things he thinks he remembers. He recalls hearing his parents argue, then seeing them get into the car. Scared of being abandoned, Sean runs after them and gets in the car. Sean recalls asking his father about the night of the murder when he was 12 years old, and his father hurting him: “He said he needed to teach me a lesson, so he took a filleting knife and cut cleanly across my wrist” (383).

Sean describes meeting Nel as “the quake” (384) in his understanding of himself and his past. Nel’s assertion that Patrick killed Lauren shatters Sean’s self-narrative. While Nel tells Sean he needs to remember the night of his mother’s death for his own sake, Sean believes Nel only wants to serve her own purpose in telling the story of the Drowning Pool as “a place to get rid of troublesome women” (385). Sean pushes Nel off the cliff to her death.