The will, the champagne, the ammonia

Faye tries to persuade Kate to stop working and manage the house instead, and Kate refuses, saying she must have the money. That night the Woodmen of the World never arrive — Clarence Monteith has died of a heart attack during the closing ritual — and Kate quietly seeds the girls with the news that Faye is unwell. Then she goes to Faye's decorated room for the promised surprise: a will leaving everything to "Kate Albey because I regard her as my daughter", and the news that there is more than sixty thousand dollars. Kate gives Faye her mother's gold watch, and Faye insists on champagne. Two glasses take the barriers down. Kate tells her what she really does with her regulars — the heelmarks, the razors, the blood caught on white silk — and how she will run the house at twenty dollars a head, then dopes her with paregoric. Sober again after mustard and water, Kate spends the dawn keeping Faye just under the surface with ammonia and a crochet hook until the night becomes an unspeakable nightmare, then screams the house awake and nurses her through it.

Wine is Kate's only reliable weakness, and the chapter is built so that her benefactor forces it on her out of affection. What follows is the repair job rather than the crime: hours of precise work with ammonia and an ivory hook to convert a confession into a dream. Ethel's line about setting up with a corpse is planted so the girls will remember the night wrongly.