Free Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac Page B

the trail, my feet as sure as those of a mountain goat. I feel like I can’t fall, but even so I stumble just before I reach him.
    But he doesn’t let me fall. Powerful arms catch me and lift me up, right off the ground, and then my dad is hugging me.
    â€œYou saved us, Molly,” he whispers into my ear. “You’re our Warrior Girl.”
    â€œDad,” I sob back. I don’t feel like a Warrior Girl at all, just a little kid who wants to cry and cry and cry.
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    I wish I could say they found my so-called uncle. But they didn’t, not on the rocks below or in the swift running stream. Even though the water was high and the current would have carried him down into the deep lake, they should have found him. But they didn’t. Where his body went remains a mystery.
    So does his real identity. I found my backpack on the trail where I threw it at him, but none of the evidence I gave them and nothing he left in the house gave any clue. They foundthe doctored photographs, the phony identification papers, all of the stuff in the computer, including the way he was able to hack into banks and databases to get money and information about people. It appeared that he’d chosen our family because of Dad’s job with the bank and because he could use me and Mom as leverage to make Dad give him the information he needed. The fact that we didn’t have any relatives made it easier for him to deceive people about being my uncle. There was also a diary, with photographs, of how he’d planned everything and carried it out. It was all there, from posing as a highway patrolman to stop their car while they were on their way home that Saturday night to stepping in as my next of kin. Everything was there except who he was and why he did it. And what he was planning to do with us in the end.
    â€œWhat was it,” the school psychiatrist said to me, “that made him want to have total control over a family like that? Was it a chemical imbalance? Perhaps it was because of things that happened to him as a child. Or perhaps not.” Then she tapped her pencil against her chin and looked wise. Right.
    I remember what my dad and mom said tome about it all when the police and the reporters and the lights and cameras were finally gone, and there was time at last for us to be alone together.
    â€œThere’s going to be a lot of people talking about this, trying to figure it all out,” Dad said. “But it seems to me that the only place where it makes sense is in our old stories.” As he spoke I realized how much the voice of the rabbit in my dreams had been like his voice. “There are still creatures that may look like people but are something else. The reason creatures like Skeleton Man do what they do is that they like to hunt us. The only way to defeat them is to be brave.”
    He smiled at me then, and I smiled back.
    I looked over at my mother and she nodded. But I could tell she had something more to say about it, too, about why he locked them up under the toolshed and barely fed them, why he pretended to be my uncle. Dad and I didn’t ask her; we just waited for her to speak.
    â€œMolly,” she said, holding my hand tight, “you know what a cat does when it catches a mouse? It doesn’t kill it and eat it right away. It plays with it for a while first.”
    And that was all she had to say about it, though Dad reached over and took both of our hands and we sat there together like that for a long time.
    Maybe, like Ms. Shabbas said to me, there never was any real why about it. “Honey,” she said, “it happened, but now it is over .” Then she sang a few lines from that musical about Don Quixote. “Yes, indeed,” she said, nodding. “You have dreamed the impossible dream.”
    I can live with that. Like one of the old stories I’ve grown up with, something evil came into the lives of good people and we found a way to defeat it.