As Marion enjoys her shower, a shadowy female figure enters the bathroom and repeatedly stabs her. Norman's strength fades, however, and as he sits dejectedly at the kitchen table, Marion tears up her note, flushes it down the toilet and enters the shower. While Marion writes a note calculating how much of the stolen money she has spent, Norman strides to the house, resolved to assert himself.

Marion then goes to her room, unaware that Norman is watching her undress through a peephole. Relaxing, Norman asserts that 'we all go a little mad sometimes.' Realizing that she has gone mad herself, Marion tells Norman that she has to return to Phoenix, in hopes of escaping a private trap. When Marion suggests that Norman could lead a life of his own if he put his mother in an institution, he reacts bitterly, stating that his mother is harmless and that he could never abandon her.

Norman relates his belief that everyone is in a trap of some kind, and that his mother is mentally ill due to the deaths of his father and later, her lover. When Marion asks if Norman has any friends, Norman replies that 'a boy's best friend is his mother,' although he admits that he wishes he could run away, as Marion is apparently doing. Marion chats with the shy Norman, who confesses how alone he is, except for his mother. When Norman returns with sandwiches, he explains to the apologetic Marion that his mother is 'not quite herself.' Norman then invites her into his parlor behind the office, where Marion is nonplussed by the birds Norman has stuffed in pursuit of his hobby, taxidermy. Marion accepts, but as she hides the cash in a newspaper she had purchased, she hears an old woman loudly berate Norman for attempting to bring a girl into her home. Later, during a fierce rainstorm, Marion misses the turnoff to Fairvale and stops at the Bates Motel, where the proprietor, Norman Bates, welcomes her and offers to fix her dinner at his home, a looming structure on the hill behind the motel. After the policeman dismisses her, Marion, afraid that he will remember her, goes to a used car lot and trades in her vehicle for one with California plates. She is awoken on Saturday morning by a highway patrolman, who is suspicious of her irritable manner. Driving until exhaustion forces her to pull over, Marion falls asleep on a lonely stretch of road. After rebuffing Cassidy again, Marion departs, but at her apartment, stuffs the money into her purse and leaves with a suitcase. Lowery, worried about leaving the money in the office over the weekend, tells Marion to take it to the bank, and Marion asks to go home afterward. When the men return, the lecherous Cassidy brags to Marion that he is paying $40,000 in cash to buy a house for his daughter. Upon her return to the real estate office where she works as a secretary, Marion learns that her boss, George Lowery, is with oil tycoon Tom Cassidy. Sam, who runs a hardware store in Fairvale, California, assures her that they can marry after he pays his debts, but Marion longs for immediate respectability. On a Friday afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona, Marion Crane and her lover, Sam Loomis, are having a romantic rendezvous at a hotel when Marion complains that she is tired of meeting Sam under such sordid circumstances.

Psycho 1998 cover