Into the Water

Jules goes to the morgue to identify Nel’s body. Jules asks after a “silver bracelet with a clasp made of onyx” (53) that belonged to their mother and that Nel always wore. It is missing and was not found with Nel’s body.

Lena describes running into friends from school and then Louise. Lena is upset that she was not allowed to identify her mother’s body, saying, “It should have been me, but they wouldn’t let me go” (55). Lena accuses Jules of ignoring Nel’s attempts to communicate with her and lying to the police about it. Lena tells Jules that Nel was unhappy; Jules replies that her relationship with Nel was complicated, and Lena calls Jules a “bitch” and storms out.

Jules, who suffers from bulimia, binges and purges, then takes a bath—something she hasn’t done since she nearly drowned as a teenager. Jules listens to Nel’s last messages, still saved in her phone. Jules recalls their mother’s wake, when her relationship with Nel went sour, with Nel asking Jules “Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?” (63) in reference to Jules’s near drowning (though Jules believes that Nel was referring to Jules’s rape by Nel’s boyfriend, Robbie). Jules rehashes her relationship with Nel, going over old arguments and feelings. 

Jules recalls being 13 years old, overweight, and dealing with her mother’s terminal illness. Nel, who is pretty and popular, does not want Jules around bothering her. As Jules lies near the Drowning Pool, Nel’s friends try to hit her with a soccer ball. Nel sees blood on Jules, thinking the boys have hurt her, but everyone realizes that Jules is bleeding from her period. Jules alludes to the fact that that night was when she nearly drowned.

Returning to the present, the story picks up with Patrick Townsend, Sean’s father. Patrick suffers from early symptoms of dementia: “Sometimes he lost words or names and it took him a long time to find them again” (73). Patrick lives in a converted barn behind his original house, where Sean now lives with his wife, Helen. Patrick notices a pregnant cat at the house and observes that he’ll “have to do something about that” (76). 

Erin goes for a run, then into work for a briefing. She finds out Nel died from the fall from the cliff, having tried to call Jules multiple times before she died, and that they pulled a fingerprint off Nel’s camera. Erin and Sean run into Nickie, who demands to know if the police are getting anywhere with “[f]inding out who pushed [Nel]” (81). Erin wonders what Nickie might know, while Sean brushes her off as crazy and unreliable. 

Sean drops by Nel’s house to tell Jules and Lena about the police findings. Both Lena and Jules insist that Nel didn’t jump. Sean presses Jules about why she didn’t answer Nel’s calls, despite Nel’s sounding desperate. Unknown to Jules at the time, Sean’s interest in what Nel might have told Jules is personal, as he likely fears it could implicate him in her death. 

Jules feels as though everyone blames her for Nel’s death, although she was not in town when it happened. She feels haunted by Nel’s ghost, observing: “I want to lay all this to rest so that maybe you can stop whispering in my ear about how you didn’t jump” (86). Jules starts going through Nel’s things—administrative papers and research on the Drowning Pool. She finds a note from Nel on her entry about Sean’s late mother, Lauren: “Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women” (89). (Lauren, it is later revealed, was murdered by Sean’s father.)

This third excerpt from Nel’s book contains the full chapter dedicated to Libby Seeton that appears in shortened form as the prologue to Into the Water. Nel hypothesizes as to how Libby must have felt prior to her drowning. In Nel’s account, the townspeople drown Libby once; then, unsatisfied that she sank the first time, they insist on drowning her a second time, this time killing her.