And how that came to be had a lot to do with the “torture,” as Fe came to refer to the medical treatment she received by the staff at the hospital. First they went about removing the cancerous moles on her legs and arms and eventually, chest and back and then whole body, so that Fe’s flesh almost all at once was scarred all over. Having her whole body surgically scraped was agony enough, but then to add to this, the stress of the mysterious subpoena would cause these scars to swell from hives, and then Fe could not even walk, much less go to work—which she still did whenever she felt well enough because of all the payments due on all the things that she and Casey had bought on credit.

The next stupefying “mistake” made by the medical staff was when feeding a catheter through her collarbone, which was supposed to supply chemotherapy down somewhere, the guideline traveled up to her head instead. They thought they removed it when she left the hospital, but they hadn’t. And until it was discovered because of an infection it caused and was finally pulled out, Fe went around feeling for seventy-one days and seventy-two nights like her brain wanted to pop out of her skull and nobody could figure out why, and they only kept insisting that it was all due to stress.

In the meantime, the FBI had come back a few times to talk to Fe. They said the reason that Acme International would have to get her a lawyer was that the chemical that she had used to clean those infamous big heavy parts in the basement was illegal; and since it was Fe alone who had used it, it was all her fault, the use of what was so obviously by then not ether (as Fe said to the FBI she had been told), but something that had already been banned in New Mexico and some other states but not in the state which was where Acme had gotten it from.

Fe didn’t understand none of it. Especially what she did not understand was how the Attorney General’s Office could be so concerned about who was to blame for the illegal use of a chemical but it was not the least bit concerned about her who was dying in front of their eyes because of having been in contact with it.

But that’s really as far as Fe got with all that drama, because after a whole lot of anxiety and not even working no more at Acme (having been put on some kind of strange probation with no pay), everything was dropped, just as quickly and unexplainedly as it had started.