Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Steadman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steadman, Catherine author.

Title: Something in the water : a novel / Catherine Steadman.

Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018005086 | ISBN 9781524797188 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524797195 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Married people—Fiction. | Honeymoons—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction | Psychological fiction

Classification: LCC PS3619.T4265 S66 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005086

Ebook ISBN 9781524797195

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

Cover photo: @ Benjamin Lee/EyeEm

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1: The Grave

Chapter 2: Anniversary Morning

Chapter 3: The Phone Call

Chapter 4: How We Met

Chapter 5: Interview One

Chapter 6: Giving Me Away

Chapter 7: Wedding Dress

Chapter 8: Food Tasting

Chapter 9: Interview Two

Chapter 10: Honeymoon

Chapter 11: A Storm Is Coming

Chapter 12: Things in the Water

Chapter 13: The Day After

Chapter 14: Flotsam or Jetsam

Chapter 15: A Dot in the Sea

Chapter 16: Flight Paths

Chapter 17: The Phone

Chapter 18: Aftermath

Chapter 19: Links

Chapter 20: Customs

Chapter 21: Home

Chapter 22: Pretty Woman

Chapter 23: The Money

Chapter 24: Are We Dead Yet?

Chapter 25: Holli’s Follow-Up

Chapter 26: The Stones

Chapter 27: Alexa’s Follow-Up

Chapter 28: Strange Things

Chapter 29: Strange People

Chapter 30: Interview Three

Chapter 31: Lottie

Chapter 32: A Man at the Door

Chapter 33: Loose Ends

Chapter 34: A Damsel in Distress

Chapter 35: Point and Squeeze

Chapter 36: Something in the Dark

Chapter 37: Mark Is Coming

Chapter 38: Tidying Up

Chapter 39: Missing Person

Chapter 40: Empty

Chapter 41: What Happened Next

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu

I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

—SARTRE, No Exit

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave? Wonder no longer. It takes an age. However long you think it takes, double that.

—

I’m sure you’ve seen it in movies: the hero, gun to his head perhaps, as he sweats and grunts his way deeper and deeper into the earth until he’s standing six feet down in his own grave. Or the two hapless crooks who argue and quip in the hilarious madcap chaos as they shovel frantically, dirt flying skyward with cartoonish ease.

It’s not like that. It’s hard. Nothing about it is easy. The ground is solid and heavy and slow. It’s so damn hard.

And it’s boring. And long. And it has to be done.

The stress, the adrenaline, the desperate animal need to do it, sustains you for about twenty minutes. Then you crash.

Your muscles yawn against the bones in your arms and legs. Skin to bone, bone to skin. Your heart aches from the aftermath of the adrenal shock, your blood sugar drops, you hit the wall. A full-body hit. But you know, you know with crystal clarity, that high or low, exhausted or not, that hole’s getting dug.

Then you kick into another gear. It’s that halfway point in a marathon when the novelty has worn off and you’ve just got to finish the joyless bloody thing. You’ve invested; you’re all in. You’ve told all your friends you’d do it, you made them pledge donations to some charity or other, one you have only a vague passing connection to. They guiltily promised more money than they really wanted to give, feeling obligated because of some bike ride or other they might have done at university, the details of which they bore you with every time they get drunk. I’m still talking about the marathon, stick with me. And then you went out every evening, on your own, shins throbbing, headphones in, building up miles, for this. So that you can fight yourself, fight with your body, right there, in that moment, in that stark moment, and see who wins. And no one but you is watching. And no one but you really cares. It’s just you and yourself trying to survive. That is what digging a grave feels like, like the music has stopped but you can’t stop dancing. Because if you stop dancing, you die.

So you keep digging. You do it, because the alternative is far worse than digging a never-ending god-awful hole in the hard compacted soil with a shovel you found in some old man’s shed.

As you dig you see colors drift across your eyes: phosphenes caused by metabolic stimulation of neurons in the visual cortex due to low oxygenation and low glucose. Your ears roar with blood: low blood pressure caused by dehydration and overexertion. But your thoughts? Your thoughts skim across the still pool of your consciousness, only occasionally glancing the surface. Gone before you can grasp them. Your mind is completely blank. The central nervous system treats this overexertion as a fight-or-flight situation; exercise-induced neurogenesis, along with that ever-popular sports mag favorite, “exercise-induced endorphin release,” acts to both inhibit your brain and protect it from the sustained pain and stress of what you are doing.

Exhaustion is a fantastic emotional leveler. Running or digging.

—

Around the forty-five-minute mark I decide six feet is an unrealistic depth for this grave. I will not manage to dig down to six feet. I’m five foot six. How would I even climb out? I would literally have dug myself into a hole.

According to a 2014 YouGov survey, five foot six is the ideal height for a British woman. Apparently that is the height that the average British man would prefer his partner to be. So, lucky me. Lucky Mark. God, I wish Mark were here.

So if I’m not digging six feet under, how far under? How deep is deep enough?

Bodies tend to get found because of poor burial. I don’t want that to happen. I really don’t. That would definitely not be the outcome I’m after. And a poor burial, like a poor anything else really, comes down to three things:

1. Lack of time

2. Lack of initiative

3. Lack of care

In terms of time: I have three to six hours to do this. Three hours is my conservative estimate. Six hours is the daylight I have left. I have time.

I believe I have initiative; two brains are better than one. I hope. I just need to work through this step by step.

And number three: care? God, do I care. I care. More than I have ever cared in my entire life.