As presumably law-abiding citizens, we often look at headlines in the news or on television or through podcasts (like Dateline), and wonder, “How can someone be so stupid as to get caught up in a web of criminality?” Or, “What caused them to cross the line between law-abiding and criminality?” Catherine Steadman’s 2018 novel, Something in the Water, I think gives a nice roadmap to the unraveling that occurs when someone crosses that line, often stupidly, greedily, and blinded by love.. And now that I think about the title, I just chuckled to myself: Something in the Water indicates the premise of the book — newlywed couple Erin and Mark find “something in the water” while honeymooning in Bora Bora that sets off a chain of escalating and ever more dangerous events — but it could also mean the idiom “there must be something in the water,” indicating enough people are doing something that “there must be something in the water.” In this case, there must be something in the water that led two seemingly law-abiding citizens like Erin and Mark to embark upon illegality.
So, as stated, Erin and Mark, are a newlywed couple and they are from London. She’s a documentarian doing a documentary about three soon-to-be-released inmates, including a notorious gangster, and he’s a wealthy banker who just lost his job. For their honeymoon, they are in Bora Bora and one day, go scuba diving where they happen upon a “debris” field of illegible paper, and then they find a bag. When they eventually open it, the bag contains a million American dollars, 200 pristinely cut diamonds likely worth a million dollars as well, a gun, a cell phone, and a USB drive. Now, I know the money and the diamonds are the eye-catching elements here, and I know that internet security professionals would rightly advise you against putting in an unknown USB into your computer, but perhaps the first thing I would do in that situation — aside from turning the bag immediately over to the police, that is (heh heh) — is see what the heck is on the flash drive! The curiosity would be tempting. But money and diamonds. The USB is out-of-sight, out-of-mind for these two until the final 40-ish pages of the book.
In the meantime, Erin and Mark go back to where they found the bag in the water and go to the ocean floor, where they find a private plane wreck with presumably Russian people onboard, who Mark says are not good people. I hedge with “presumably” because only Mark saw the plane crash, and Mark is an unreliable narrator. Which brings me to how the book started: with Erin burying Mark’s body. Now, obviously at that point, I don’t know what’s occurred, or if Erin is even responsible for his death or is “just” burying him, but it naturally makes me skeptical of Mark! Thus, anything he tells me going forward in Erin’s retelling (which, to be fair, she could be an unreliable narrator, too!), I’m going to look at through a sinister lens.
To put a finer point on it: in my humble opinion, Mark manipulates and gaslights Erin even long before Bora Bora and the bag of money and diamonds. He’s a complete jerk to her the moment he loses his fancy, rich banking job. She forgives him and marries him anyway because she thinks he’s under a lot of stress and it’s her fault for not realizing the stress he was under while she was planning a glitzy, extremely expensive wedding. See how that manipulation and gaslighting works? That theme of Mark withholding information or doing something wrong or different than Erin expected, but Erin being led to believe it was her fault and forgiving him in turn, permeates the rest of the book.
Erin, though, is no saint, either. As I said at the top, she’s basically the quintessential stupid criminal who stumbled into it, and then keeps stumbling because once you start stumbling, it can be hard to stop. She gets greedy about the money and the diamonds and then getting even more money later from whomever was behind the people who died in the plane crash in exchange for the USB drive. All of which is imbued with some irony because the focus of her documentary is about criminals and trying to understand and humanize them, which in effect, I think, is what Steadman wants us to do with Erin. To at least understand how she arrived at the point we find her in at the beginning of the book where she’s burying Mark’s body. Also, of course, the documentary plot device is used to set-up Erin’s connection with Eddie, the notorious gangster who helps her get out of the fixes she finds herself in later in the book. Now, don’t get me wrong. In some ways, Erin is smart and capable in how she’s able to navigate a world she didn’t previously understand — the criminal underworld — and she’s smart to circumvent a number of forces circling around her. First, whomever is behind the people who perished in the plane crash. Secondly, unbeknownst to her, the conniving, backstabbing husband of hers, Mark, who is planning to remove her from the equation and take the money to start a new life in New York. Third, the actual authorities who are peripherally looking into her concerning one of her interviewees in the documentary, Holli, who apparently has become a radicalized terrorist upon her release. Also, it must be said, that a small part of Erin must’ve known something wasn’t right about Mark, or maybe it was her own character flaws, too, or both, because she kept secrets from Mark as well, such as the fact of being pregnant.
Eventually, Erin realizes she’s been had by Mark because she catches him retrieving the USB and handing it off for payment to a stranger (the man behind the people in the plane crash). When Mark can’t tell this stranger the coordinates to the plane crash, the stranger kills him. The goon Mark paid to scare off and harm (but apparently not kill) Erin, is also dead, perhaps by the stranger, too. These are the two bodies Erin buries. Then, she reports Mark missing to the authorities.
I don’t think Erin set out to be a criminal, but I would venture a guess that most criminals don’t, even of this sort of white collar-ish crime (well, up to the point of burying bodies and fabricating a story about it all). But greed, the pressure of rose-colored glasses love, and naivete can go along way to propelling individuals forward from the side of law-abiding to the side of criminality, and before you know it, you’re behind bars on the latter side. Granted, fortunately for Erin, and again, this is where she’s smarter than the other stupid criminals (or better connected through Eddie, at least), she gets away with it.
We never do find out what was on that USB drive or who the people on the crashed plane were, or the mystery man who killed Mark (and presumably the other guy) was. But that’s all sort of beside the point of Erin’s tumble into criminality. If we found all those things out, would it have changed anything? Or our opinion of Erin’s tumble? I don’t think so, and I think that’s the point. Erin still would have tumbled and we, or at least, I, would still view her as essentially an okay person who made unfortunate and illegal choices.
I’ve read a few of the Reese’s Book Club books, of which this is one, and so if you’re familiar with those books as well, I think you’ll like this one, too.
Milam's Musings 