53 pages • 1 hour read
Something in the Water
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Chapters 16-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Flight Paths”
The plane is a Gulfstream G650 and registered to a company in Russia called Aegys-Mutual Consultants. Aegys-Mutual Consultants is likely a shell company—a front for less savory businesses so they don’t get discovered. Erin’s pretty sure now that someone is missing the plane because “Sixty-million-dollar planes, their crews, and their owners don’t just vanish” (128).
While Mark looks through pictures from various criminal wanted lists to identify the bodies from the plane, Erin remembers the iPhone that was in the bag. Mark refuses to turn it on because it will project a signal, proving they found the bag and “hid the evidence” (132). Erin knows turning it on will save them time and give them information. She resolves to do it tomorrow and not tell Mark.
Chapter 17 Summary: “The Phone”
The next morning, Erin makes an excuse about needing to do something for work and takes the phone to the hotel business center to check it. She sets the phone to airplane mode, and connects to the hotel wi-fi. While she checks the text, the icon for someone typing comes up. Erin remembers iPhones “send read receipts to the sender,” which means someone knows the phone is in use again (139). Erin responds to the text and immediately realizes how stupid that was. Whoever’s at the other end asks who she is. She powers down the phone and runs back to the room because she needs Mark to “help me fix this” (141).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Aftermath”
After Mark calms down, they work through what the people on the other end of the phone could know or infer. They could track Erin to the phone by the timestamps on the hotel security cameras outside the business center. To stay safe, Mark and Erin “need to get rid of the footage” (143). Mark and Erin fake food poisoning to get behind the desk in the hotel lobby. Once the attendant goes to get Erin a drink, Erin erases the footage, changes the security system settings, and steals her and Mark’s passport photos from a filing cabinet. When the attendant returns, Mark distracts her while Erin fakes needing the bathroom so she can destroy the evidence.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Links”
Back in their hotel room, Mark praises Erin for her great work. Erin feels calm about the entire thing until she realizes they forgot about their info being on the hotel computer. Under the guise of following up on Erin’s food poisoning, Mark goes right back to the office to delete their information “from the system completely” (150).
Forty-three minutes later, a successful Mark returns. Erin wants to feel excited but can’t. She relays everything she’s thought about since he left, including that whoever’s at the other end of the phone likely has the information and means to find the hotel and them. Mark changes their flights to tomorrow. While packing, the question of what to do with the money comes up. They determine that, even if whoever’s looking for them gets to the hotel, there are too many variables for them to track Erin and Mark past there. They decide they can “take it and no one will ever find out” (154).
Chapters 16-19 Analysis
In Chapter 17, Erin turns on the phone from the bag. She realizes the danger she and Mark stumbled into with the bag but communicates with whoever’s at the other end of the phone’s texts anyway. Erin makes poor decisions, something she knows but hasn’t tried to modify out of her behavior. Her poor decision-making skills lead her into trouble throughout the book. If Mark never truly loved her, Erin’s decision to get involved with him might be a poor one and be responsible for the situation she’s in now. Erin’s fear of what she might have done with the phone leads her to seek Mark’s aid. Mark later uses her fear against her to maintain her fear and paranoia. Fear also leads Erin to think through her decisions more in later chapters. She relies on Mark to fix things less and less, perhaps because she subconsciously knows he’s up to something. The bad outcomes of her previous poor decisions and her inability to trust her husband force her to grow as a person. Her later decisions come with the desire to protect her family, and she takes responsibility for whatever comes of those decisions.
Erin’s fake food poisoning in Chapter 18 starts her and Mark down a criminal path. Up until now, everything they’ve done is legal, if not completely ethical, but tampering with hotel security makes them criminals. When their success is short-lived with Erin’s realization their information is still on the hotel computer, and Mark performs their first cover-up, we see how crime mimics the domino effect. One small crime leads to a second, then a third, and so on. Small fixes become big problems until Mark and Erin are in too deep to backpedal.
Mark plays the part of affronted husband in Chapter 18. Erin acknowledges how good his acting skills are, which is ironic. Those skills allow him to fool her with later roles, encompassing concern, anger, and humoring. His praise of Erin in Chapter 19 shows him as encouraging. By building her up, he draws attention away from all the small ways he belittles her or discredits her ideas. Mark easily slips into new personas, which hints at how easily he might grow tired of a role, explaining his desire to leave Erin behind and begin anew in New York.
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