The FBI agents get permission to take Patty into Memphis as her father has demanded. They assume that he is going to accompany his daughter when they take her in for questioning, but when it is time to go, Mr. Bergen says he cannot leave, because he is waiting for a call from his lawyer. As Patty walks out the door with the agents, she says good-bye to her father, but he does not answer.

As Patty and the two men walk to the car that is parked downtown, they must pass through a crowd of people milling around Bergen's Department Store. Word of Patty's ignominy has spread, and she is spat upon and called a "Jew Nazi-lover" by angry citizens. Sheriff Cauldwell intervenes, berating the crowd and making them disperse. As Patty gets into the FBI agents' car, the sheriff hands her a Bible, telling her, "Times when I was down this helped lift me up."

The agents take Patty to her grandparents' house in Memphis. Patty apologizes for all the trouble she is causing, but Grandma Fried says that the whole situation is ludicrous and that Patty has no need to be ashamed. In the morning, Patty goes with the lawyer her father has hired to the offices of the FBI. She tells the agents everything they want to know and insists that she acted alone; no one else knew what she was doing.

When they are finished with their interrogation, the FBI agents take Patty back to her grandparents' house, advising her to stay there for a while, as her parents are being harassed back in Jenkinsville. Mr. and Mrs. Bergen have been receiving threatening phone calls, and the window of their store has been broken. Patty does not understand why they should be facing their neighbors' wrath when they had nothing to do with what she did. In the evening, Charlene Madlee, the reporter from the big city newspaper, comes to visit. She says that the Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute Patty under the Treason Act because of her age, but warns that if there is a public outcry, the state of Arkansas may charge her with a lesser crime, such as delinquency, and send her to reform school.

Mr. Kishner, the Jewish lawyer chosen by Patty's father against the FBI agents' advice, is reluctant to get involved in her predicament, but Mr. Bergen uses his influence with the Beth Zion Synagogue to force him to take the case. Although Patty wants to explain to the judge that she had helped Anton because "he wasn't a Nazi or a spy," but was "the kindest, smartest man [she'd] ever met," Mr. Kishner will not allow her to do so. Instead, the lawyer tries to get Patty to admit that she had been afraid that Anton would harm her or her family if she did not do what he asked. When Patty asserts repeatedly that she had never been afraid, Mr. Kishner argues instead that Patty was too young to understand that Anton was an escaped prisoner.

Telling Patty that she has "embarrassed Jews everywhere," calling their loyalty into question because she herself has been disloyal by helping a German soldier, the judge sentences her to the Arkansas Reformatory for Girls. When she arrives at the facility, Patty notices that the windows of the imposing brick building are covered with heavy wire screening, the kind of screening that is used to confine the animals at the Memphis Zoo.