Mullet Fingers

Here is some information about Mullet Fingers--which will contain spoilers about the end of the story. A runaway who lives in the woods and the junkyard, he is Beatrice Leep's step-brother, and his real name is Napoleon Bridger, but readers don't find that out until the last chapter. As a younger child, he wanted to spend all his time outdoors. When his mother, Lonna, married Beatrice's father, she nagged at Napoleon constantly and eventually sent...

History
Here is some information about Mullet Fingers--which will contain spoilers about the end of the story. A runaway who lives in the woods and the junkyard, he is Beatrice Leep's step-brother, and his real name is Napoleon Bridger, but readers don't find that out until the last chapter. As a younger child, he wanted to spend all his time outdoors. When his mother, Lonna, married Beatrice's father, she nagged at Napoleon constantly and eventually sent him away to boarding school when Napoleon brought a baby raccoon into the house. Napoleon kept running away from the schools, and the last time he ran away, Lonna didn't even bother to tell her husband, report it to the police, or try to find her son. Mullet Fingers received his nickname because he is able to catch swimming mullet fish in his bare hands.

Mullet Fingers is passionate about nature and wildlife, which is why he tries to interfere with the pancake house being constructed on the site where the burrowing owls live. In the end, he is even willing to risk revealing his own identity and whereabouts to stop the company from burying the owls. At the end of the novel, he goes back to live with Lonna, who pretends for a time to want him, but he runs away. She falsely accuses him of stealing, and he gets sent to juvenile detention, from which he escapes using Dana Matherson as a decoy. In the Epilogue, he lets Roy know he's still in the area, perhaps living in the woods again, but doesn't let Roy see him.