Three-Zee in a Maze

By John A. Miller, Jr.

Explore a corn maze as autumn begins. It’s fun; it’s family friendly; and, oops, it’s a great place to murder somebody and get away before anybody discovers the body. Three-Zee Zook and her best friend, Bambi Bamberger, learn this the hard way when they’re the ones who find the body at a genuine dead end. Then it’s home to Mountain Woods Resort where there are no local cornfields but lots of woods, just the place to set up a Haunted Woods activity prior to Halloween. Oops again, another dead body. As usual, none of their ghosts are any help whatsoever.

Include a bunch of high school kids working as ghouls to enhance the Haunted Woods experience, and you have a chaotic situation not helped in the least by a couple of questionable resort guests and the near demise of one of the kids. Three-Zee and Bambi wind up spending a lot of time trying to figure out who’s doing what to whom and why, eventually bringing everything to a rather messy conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John A. Miller, Jr.
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005817060

John A. Miller, Jr.

John Miller, writing under his full name of John A. Miller, Jr., started writing novels back in late 1991 after working for many years in the mainframe computer and telecommunication fields. He had lived in southern Arizona so he knew the area well and set his first novel, Pima, in that area. Shortly after writing that novel he moved back to southern Arizona where he wrote five more novels in the Pima Series. He returned to his home area near Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1999 and continued to write, launching the Victorian Mansion Series with its nine novels.Since retiring from their day jobs John and his wife have enjoyed visiting Cape Cod and The Bayside Resort in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts at least once every year, so with their permission he partially set there a standalone novel, The Bayside Murders.Recently, after reading a number of cozy mysteries, John decided to launch a new series in that genre and named it Three-Zee for its main character, Zelanie Zephora Zook.

Book preview

Don’t Turn Your Back

Do you know, I’ve never done this before. I mean, I’ve lived most of my life in Pennsylvania, and yet prior to today I’ve never entered a corn maze. Of course, where I grew up, we didn’t have many cornfields.

Really? It’s fun, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is. I used to think it was just for kids, but actually it’s quite tricky. I keep thinking I should try to be more methodical, but I can’t imagine how I could do that. Are you employed here?

No, not exactly, but I do know my way around.

Well, you certainly have that Halloween look. Anyway, it was kind of you to escort me, but it would be cheating if I relied on you to lead me through.

Yes, it would.

Silence for a moment except for the steady crunch of footsteps on broken cornstalks and occasional shouts from distant persons.

Let’s see, how about we try this direction? By the way, how many of those posts have I found so far?

Let me count the punches. Let’s see, one, two, three, four, five… Yes, five, but the card has space for eighteen punches. That means only thirteen to go.

Lucky number thirteen.

I guess. You aren’t superstitious, are you?

No, I suppose not. Let’s try this path. A pause. Haven’t we been on this one before? I sort of remember that bent cornstalk.

Another period of crunching footsteps.

Damn! This one’s a dead end, and it looked so promising.

So, we turn around and try the next one. After all, it shouldn’t be too hard to stumble upon at least a couple more posts without really trying. There are thirteen more of them somewhere out there.

Here, let me pass you so I can lead again.

Okay.

Loud rustling noises like clothing brushing against dry cornstalks. Then, Garrk! followed by louder rustling along with thrashing and other sounds of a struggle. After about a minute, silence returns.

It would have been even more fun for you if you’d paid your debts. Now, how the hell do I get out of here?

Silence except for the steady crunch of footsteps on broken cornstalks and occasional shouts from distant persons.

After the Wedding

If you read my previous chronicle, Three-Zee at a Wedding, you are aware that the destination wedding between my aunt, Gladys Snyder, and her fiancé, Terry Baxter, didn’t come off exactly as planned. In fact, it didn’t come off at all, and we all returned from Cape Cod to our various homes with Aunt Gladys and Terry still unmarried. In fact, Terry had suffered a relapse, probably because of all the stress, and wasn’t declared fit by his doctor until the middle of September. Consequently, Bambi and I had begged off from our jobs at the Mountain Woods Resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains and made the journey to our family homes in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for the wedding. Admittedly, getting the long weekend off was helped by the fact our boss, George Wylie, resident manager and part owner of Mountain Woods, is engaged to be married to my mom, but I try not to pull the poor future-stepdaughter chain too often.

Okay, who the heck am I? I’m Zelanie Zephora Zook, mostly known as Three-Zee because who’d want to be called Zelanie Zephora all the time. Even most of my schoolteachers used to call me Three-Zee although there were a few holdouts who insisted on Zelanie, claiming that it sounded so musical. I guess it does, and it’s really not all that bad, but throw in the Zephora and Zook and, well, you get the idea.

The aforementioned Bambi is Bambi Bamberger, who grew up on a neighboring farm and has been my best friend since Mom and I moved back to Mom’s family’s farm in Pennsylvania from Oregon after my dad died suddenly of a heart attack when I was only seven. (That was a mouthful. Breathe, Three-Zee, breathe.) Now I’m a big girl, twenty-nine, who knows how to take care of herself. (I can hear some of you disagreeing over there in the corner. Please keep quiet, or I’ll think of something unpleasant to say about you.)

Joining us in the drive from Mountain Woods to Lancaster County in my rather beat-up old car was Bambi’s main squeeze, Pete Gardenko, stepson of our boss and disgustingly handsome former actor wannabee. In fact, Pete has only one flaw. He’s dead and has been for at least a year and a half. In fact, until that trip to Cape Cod, Bambi had never seen him except for photos. However, something unexplained happened during that trip allowing Bambi to see and talk with ghosts, a questionable talent I’ve had at least since I spoke with my own father shortly after his death. Okay, maybe Pete has a few more flaws than that, but generally he’s been good to have around, although how he and Bambi manage to, well, you know, beats me, not that I really want to know the details. In fact, their relationship flourished even before she could see or hear him—something about a sexy chill.

We lucked out with the weather, probably that Indian Summer magic that tends to hit the Northeast somewhere between late September and mid-November, and the wedding came off without any additional hitches on Friday evening in our old family church, which also happens to be Terry’s. He’d already bought our family farm, which lay adjacent to his own, with the caveat that Mom and my younger brother, Joe, along with me when I was home, could continue living in the house until we decided not to, whenever that might be. Of course, Aunt Gladys was moving into Terry’s house after having lived her entire life in the family home.

George had been generous with the time off, allowing Bambi and me to return by Sunday evening after leaving Thursday afternoon, even though we’d already had more than a week away from work in June for the Cape Cod sojourn. As I said, it’s not what you know, but who, or is that whom? Anyway, my job at the resort is working for the activities director, mostly leading hikes on the several trails and running Bingo and other games during inclement weather. Bambi helps out at the front desk during the rather large Sunday turnover, but mostly she’s training to be a chef while working as a line cook in the kitchen. Mountain Woods is one of those resorts that feeds its guests well.

Saturday morning found Bambi and me at rather loose ends. Aunt Gladys and Terry had gone off on a honeymoon to somewhere but probably not Cape Cod. Joe had gone off with several friends. Bambi was staying with her folks, but Saturday on a farm during the latter half of harvest season doesn’t leave a lot of spare time for the residents, and Bambi wasn’t about to get out in the field and bale hay. Mom didn’t have that obligation because she and Aunt Gladys had been leasing out the farm to Terry even before he bought it. I was sitting on my bed staring out the window at a beautiful morning, way too nice to be hiding indoors. I picked up my phone and texted Bambi, What do you want to do?

Bambi must have been hovering over her phone because she replied almost immediately with, Don’t know. You?

Texting has its good points, especially when you have a quick message to send and are expecting an equally quick reply. However, it fails miserably for an extended conversation. So, I bit the bullet and actually initiated a voice call, almost anathema to a modern young person (twenty-nine is young).

So, any ideas? I asked after Bambi answered.

Not really. Maybe shopping?

Would, but not much money.

Yeah, me too.

Silence for a few moments while we both pondered, or at least I guess Bambi was pondering because we hadn’t set up a video call so I couldn’t see her face.

Does Terry still have that corn maze on his farm?

Yeah, I guess. In prior years Terry had bought into the corn maze thing, devoting several acres of good feed corn to a complex maze that brought in tourists and a surprising amount of cash for relatively little investment. Yes, there was the cost of licensing the GPS version of the maze and bringing in a contractor with the radio-controlled cutters, but once cut, the maze held up surprisingly well from early September through Halloween, after which the corn that hadn’t been trampled could be harvested for feed, its original purpose.

What does he charge?

I don’t know. Let me call and find out.

An Amazing Maze

As I said earlier, it’s not what you know, but who. Terry’s brother, Herb, was running the maze in Terry’s absence, and when I mentioned my name, he said we should show up and could go through the maze for free. The only restriction was that we’d be ineligible for any prizes for finding all the hidden posts. Meanwhile, I’d given more consideration to Bambi’s suggestion that we go shopping and decided that I really didn’t need money to go shopping, except maybe for a bit to buy gas. It’s buying that’s the problem.

I picked up Bambi and Pete at Bambi’s folks’ farm—okay, her parents didn’t know about Pete, but ghosts have this remarkable ability to stay hidden, especially from people who can’t see them. Bambi didn’t argue with me about checking out the latest clothing options, not that either of us could remotely afford most of them, so we headed for the mall. Pete looked a bit annoyed at the change in plans, but when a woman decides to go shopping, what her male companion wants is usually ignored.

It was late afternoon by the time we’d exhausted our fashion investigations, during most of which time Pete had decided to make himself invisible to us and gone off to wherever ghosts go when not busy haunting. After a stop at McDonald’s for a nourishing meal, we made the run to Terry’s farm, which was directly behind ours. There were quite a few cars parked in the hay field that was adjacent to the corn maze and that had generated quite a few bales of hay earlier in the year—another example of maximizing use of the land. I pulled in and the three of us (or is that two and one-half?—Do ghosts count as a full person?) made our way to the ticket booth. Pete had decided to return from wherever by then. Herb was working the cash register, so he merely handed us our wristbands, wished us good luck, and handed us the framed aerial photo of the maze to study, which we would not be allowed to photograph or carry with us.

Traditional mazes associated with European stately homes are permanent affairs of carefully trimmed tall shrubs with usually some sort of fancy fountain or equivalent in the center. Corn mazes, on the other hand, are merely corn fields with hewn paths that in an aerial view usually form a line drawing of some sort of physical object, such as a railroad locomotive, a fire engine, or clowns and circus animals. Because the design isn’t permanent, this allows the maze creator to produce a new pattern every year and reattract the same customers with a new challenge. The drawback is that as the season progresses, the corn becomes dry and brittle, and eventually unintentional pathways are broken through by overzealous people trying to simplify their routes.

We’d arrived at the maze at about midseason, so the corn was still in pretty good shape. This year Terry had decided upon a Halloween theme, with sheeted ghosts and carved jack-o-lanterns. Pete thought the sheeted ghosts were a bit insulting, and I agreed with him that I’d never seen a ghost wearing a sheet with eyeholes, but the public’s perception was what counted. After all, they were the ones paying the bills, and most of them had never seen an actual ghost, which looks exactly like the person did at the time they died except that the gory bits aren’t evident.

After returning the photo, I led the way to the gap in the wall of cornstalks clearly labeled Enter here. I noticed an adjacent opening labeled, Exit only. However, while we were walking the thirty yards or so to the entrance, I saw one family group emerge from the exit and immediately reenter through the entrance, probably having missed some of the posts and heading back in for another try.

Because we’d thought ahead for once and realized that trying to find all the hidden posts in the corn maze would take us well beyond the onset of darkness, we’d purchased a couple of cheap LED headlamps, figuring that this would leave our hands free for our phones and whatever. Pete didn’t need a headlamp because he could see pretty well even in almost total darkness. Besides, such a device would probably have fallen right through his head.

As we entered the maze walking into a dirt-floored pathway with seven-foot-tall cornstalks on each side, I inhaled deeply. There’s an aroma associated with corn that changes throughout the seasons as well as whether the soil is wet from recent rain or dry as it was today. The autumn dry scent is a combination of dusty and musty and surprisingly soothing. Of course, I’d spent most of my life living on a working farm, so maybe my perceptions are different from somebody brought up with the traffic smell of a big city.

Corn mazes based upon images rather than a mere grid pattern have pathways that are rarely straight, which means that we’d gone only a few paces from the entrance before our visibility along the three-foot-wide path was cut to less than ten feet, both forward and back. The initial stretch of this particular layout had no branches for a surprisingly long time before we suddenly reached an intersection with two pathways leading at different angles to the right and one to the left. Five choices normally would lead to a lot of confusion, even if one rules out one of the choices, which would require one to backtrack, and in this case return to the entrance.

Both Bambi and I are corn maze veterans, having visited many mostly during our teenage years, and immediately turned left. Our initial route nearly always involves following the perimeter trail, after which we delve into the internal, and generally much more confusing, pathways. Also, it’s surprising how many of the posts, three-foot tall wooden affairs with a number cut into the wood and a hole punch attached, each with a unique punch shape, are located on that perimeter trail. We each had received a card upon entry, and that card had space for eighteen numbered punches. Collect all eighteen and become eligible to win a prize, although because Bambi and I were freeloaders, we couldn’t join that group. Still, the thrill of the chase and all that…

For the moment it was still light enough for us to see where we were going without using our headlamps although darkness falls by around seven-thirty in this area in late September. After a couple more intersections, at each of which we’d taken the leftmost path, so we’d be following the perimeter in a more-or-less clockwise direction, we came to a small indentation to the right and at the end of that short dead-end path stood post number one. We each punched our card, this first hole being in the shape of a five-pointed star, and returned to the main trail to continue on our way.

There’s a theory about how to find your way out of a maze based upon keeping one hand on the wall at all times. There are two drawbacks to that theory. One is that one could wind up walking a much longer distance because one might have to enter many dead-end pathways and then return before reaching the exit. The other depends upon not having any free-floating sections. Think of a lake with islands. When one is on an island, following the edge will not bring one to the end of the lake but merely around the island and back to one’s starting point. Kind of a no-win situation. Consequently, neither Bambi nor I relies upon this method to find our way out.

Our initial circuit took us about fifteen minutes—it was a big maze—and the way we knew we’d completed that circuit was when we reached the exit. During the loop we’d found only five of the posts—thirteen to go.

By now it was growing much darker, and Terry’s brother or one his minions had lit a couple of fires in old truck wheels that were acting as fire rings in the open area of the mown hayfield. Each was surrounded by about a dozen Adirondack chairs for people to take a break. Bambi and I exited, decided we weren’t tired enough yet to need a sit-down, and headed back in for interior searching.

Our paper wristbands, a different color for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, guaranteed reentry to the maze for further exploring. I suppose one could have come back a week later and reused the same band, but I doubt it would have survived that long unless, of course, one didn’t wash the wrist around which the band was wrapped.

This time as we walked along that first stretch, which had to be at least twenty yards long, I stumbled over a low hump in the dirt path. Pete, who’d mostly been following us without comment, began to laugh and called me Grace. I threw him a dirty look and switched on the lamp strapped around my head. It threw a surprisingly strong beam although I had to adjust it downward after Bambi complained I was shining it into her eyes and blinding her. My phone could be used for more detailed lighting if necessary although I distinctly remembered several times when a dead phone battery had left us in total darkness at a critical point. I even checked my phone for charge—about seventy percent and hopefully enough for my needs because I wasn’t sure how long the cheap headlamp batteries would last.

This time when we reached the first intersection, we decided to make a hard right—in a complex maze, unless one has a map, a photograph, or an incredible memory, most decisions about routes other than the perimeter are generally based upon sheer guesswork. In only a few steps we found ourselves swinging sharply to the right and then to the left and then to the right again. A vague memory of the aerial photo we’d been shone made me think that we were traversing the rippled bottom edge of one of the ghosts’ sheets. We followed past a few more sharp swings and then an intersection with a single right branch, which we took. More ripples—probably the sheet of another ghost—and then a long, sweeping curve to a circular clump of corn. Maybe an eyehole. Next to it was another circular clump—probably another eyehole—with post number seventeen directly between them.

Posts are seldom placed in any sort of numerical order, and I know from past experience that they sometimes get moved from day to day. They also aren’t marked on the aerial photo one gets to view briefly upon entry. No point in making it too easy to win the grand prize, which is either a free large pumpkin or free admission to the maze on another day. As I said earlier, corn mazes are a good way to make money.

Bambi punched a crescent-shaped hole into her card and then asked Pete, Sweetheart, you’ve been so quiet. Aren’t you enjoying yourself?

Not really, I guess. Ghosts don’t seem to have any better memories than people—at least I don’t—so I can’t give you much guidance as to which way to turn. Mainly I’m just along for the walk.

Couldn’t you take a shortcut through the corn and find all the posts?

"I guess I could go back and forth and kind of figure out where the posts are, but I can’t fly overhead and see which paths you should follow to get to them. At least I wouldn’t break down any of the cornstalks if I walked through them, but what good would it do?

Yeah, I see your point.

I’d remained silent during this exchange. I admit I don’t understand Bambi’s love life, but who am I to judge?

** ** **

We’d been wandering through the interior of the maze for about another hour and had found seven more posts, bringing our total to thirteen with only five more to go, when I decided to take a sharp right at a six-way intersection that I think we’d been through several times earlier. This path turned out to be a dead end; unfortunately, in more ways than one.

A Really Dead End

Bam, do you see what I see?

I don’t know. Your fat butt’s in the way.

Sorry. Pete, stop laughing!

I know your butt’s not fat. In fact, it’s rather nice, as butts go. Pete tends to make some cryptic comments that make me wonder where he’s been hanging out