Kate discovers there are clever people

Shaken by Cal's parting line, Kate checks the capsule of morphine she keeps on a chain with her safe-deposit keys and Faye's gold watch, and remembers the only other person who ever made her feel this way: Samuel Hamilton. The memory eating at her is Ethel, one of Faye's old girls, who came back poor and sick and told a dream — Kate crossing the yard on the wet night Faye died — and admitted she had gathered the smashed medicine bottles and the tip of an eye-dropper into an envelope kept with a friend. Kate paid her a hundred dollars a month, then had her framed for robbery and run over the county line. Afterwards the real fear arrives: there are clever people in the world. Why bury the bottles unless they mattered? What would a clever person make of a rich madam who willed everything to a new girl and then died? Kate takes bromide, dreads being looked at in the street, and builds the grey lean-to she says is for her eyes.

Kate's method turned on Kate: she reconstructs her own crime as an outsider would, and the reasoning that kept her safe for years is what convicts her. What frightens her is not evidence but the existence of clever people, named as two dead men. She can hold two opposing thoughts at once — the light hurts, the room is a burrow — a skill until now spent on other people.