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who had brought along his rock-climbing neighbor in order to verify the car and body, a wrecker with the county had then cleared the scene, and only then, finally, had a long chain of phone calls begun. Sheriff to the state of Texas and to the State Farm Insurance office, State Farm Insurance agent Dick Little who actually knew Misty Mueller, and had had occasion to catch sight of her daughter. Dick Little prided himself on a personal approach to insurance, as if Houston were still (was it ever?) a small town. Misty lived in the neighborhood; she’d come to his Montrose office a few times on the January Sunday morning when the annual city marathon took place, when Dick threw his party, watching from the office deck, serving mimosas, and cheering the runners. He and Misty had been drinking orange juice minus the champagne; sometimes she attended the same AA meetings he did, one or the other of them providing rides. Dick had mistaken her for a lesbian.
    It was Dick Little who first began to search for Misty’s daughter, Cattie, and he was successful only because he’d been wily enough to guess that her cell number would be only a digit different from her mother’s, which had been logged on a form she’d updated just six months ago. Cattie here , said a flat gruff voice just like Misty’s. Gimme what you got, mothafucka .
    “Whoa,” said Dick Little; he didn’t know any teenagers.
    The lawyers were slower to react. The will had been filed a decade earlier; her address had changed since then, as had her job, her phone numbers, the vehicle she drove. Her daughter had grown out of adorable toddlerhood into troublesome adolescence and been sent to Vermont, to a boarding school, and that information had been garnered only because the woman who picked up the phone at Houston’s Lamar High remembered having faxed multiple transcripts and immunization records east on behalf of Catherine (Cattie) Mueller. It was as if that private school thought the child might be feral and her home state negligent.
    Still, by the time Cattie learned of her mother’s death, it had been weeks since they’d spoken. It seemed unthinkable that a standoff could end this way, one of them having finally gotten the indubitable last word, and now being told, in the head of school’s office by no fewer than three adults, that Cattie had, in effect, won. Cattie sat without speaking, staring at her uniformed thighs, a plaid that vibrated if she let her eyes go loose in focus. All disciplinary action taken against her at this school had involved her refusal to speak—to provide justification or explanation for persistent rule breaking (uniform knee socks: lost; laptop computer: neglected; nighttime curfew: ignored). Each adult had a style of handling youth; none of them was effective with this girl, not the head of school’s tart British professionalism, not the school therapist’s hip liberal understanding, not the band director’s goofy know-nothing nerdiness. They’d been aware of her isolation, not the ordinary shy newness of a recent enrollee eager for friends but the more entrenched solitude of the loner who didn’t care if people liked her. In her unwavering stare one saw the adult looking out. By and large, people declined to challenge her.
    She nodded in answer to all of their questions and assertions. She understood they were there for her. She agreed that it was tragic. She heard them say that she was stunned, that they were stunned—who wouldn’t be stunned? Other students had lost parents. The school was not unfamiliar with this dilemma. There was precedence, contingency plans, a series of next steps. She understood everything they had so far said. She did indeed wish to be left, for a moment, alone.
    As a group, this trio of adults decided the girl must be in shock. This was what they told themselves when they finally left her by herself (simply vacated the head of school’s office, prepared to wait out her shock in the waiting room