A funeral, and Kate turns kind

The Nigger dies and is buried exactly as her will demands: an ebony and silver casket, four candles, no flowers, no sermon, no grief, and only her small black husband, who fills the grave himself while the caretaker hears a whining carried on the wind. Coming away from the mortuary Joe Valery falls in with Alf Nichelson, the town's handy man and inexhaustible gossip, who built Kate's windowless lean-to and never believed the story about her eyes. Over three beers each Alf gives Joe everything — that nobody knows how Kate came to own Faye's house, that there were suspicions, that Kate may be Adam Trask's wife — and gets nothing back, which convinces him Joe has something to hide. That evening Joe risks it: a fellow said he had seen Ethel, here. After ten seconds of silence Kate changes her whole story — she was wrong about Ethel and wants to make it up to her. Joe leaves gripping his elbows with joy, remembering his father's warning about soup carriers.

Kate overplays her hand for the first time, and Joe reads the kindness as a tell because his father once told him what a soup carrier is. Her questioning of Helen afterwards is the giveaway the reader gets and Joe does not: she is asking how a woman's funeral looks from outside. Alf shows how little any of her arrangements ever concealed.