Free The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery by Melanie Jackson Page A

sweetie,” my mother prodded as Todd smiled in a nasty way. “It’s a hay bale maze. Go on inside and see if you can find your way back out.”
    I wanted to argue, to tell her that Todd would do something mean to me if I went inside. But I knew Mom wouldn’t believe me. She knew that I could figure out things after they happened, but she didn’t believe that sometimes I knew what people would do even before they did them.
    “Come on, Chloe. Don’t be a fraidy cat.” Mom frowned at Todd’s taunt but didn’t say anything. She never seemed to know how to deal with boys and she wanted me to act ‘normal’.
    I had never been in a maze, but already didn’t like the look of that thing. Todd daring me didn’t help.  I had gotten lost once in the park and didn’t enjoy it and couldn’t see why I would want to get lost on purpose. But I was determined to experience all that the pumpkin patch had to offer so that I would have a good story to tell the next time I saw Althea, my older and snottier cousin. So, I went inside even though it was dark and smelly and Todd was there and planning to scare me in some way.
    I walked slowly through the darkness of the maze.  The labyrinth was a series of tunnels created by stacking hay bales at various angles and then topping the whole thing off with a canvas tarp. Naturally, it smelled heavily of hay which made me sneeze. I like hay, but it also smelled like the dry dirt being kicked up off the floor and the oily tarp that covered the maze, neither very pleasant. But worst of all was the smell of rot where the wet hay was going bad.
    Every once in a while a bigger kid would come shooting around a corner screaming as they ran past me and came close to knocking me over. Todd should have been holding my hand but he had disappeared. The worst were the kids who were wearing scary masks. Let me tell you, I was plenty scared the whole time, but I kept on moving forward. No way was anyone ever going to call me a fraidy cat.
    Whoever had constructed the maze had poked holes between the bales of hay so that some light would be let in, but it was still darker than I would have liked. As I walked past each of these holes, I was careful to make sure that no one— like Todd — was there on the outside to try and grab me as I shuffled by.
    Eventually I made it to the center of the maze. I could tell that I had made it to the halfway point because I entered a large rectangular room that had another of those big scarecrows. Walking toward the middle of the room I tried to get my bearings and locate the way out. That’s when it struck.
    Apparently the trap was rigged ahead of time and left there so that parents on the outside could get in on the fun of terrifying the kids inside. The trap was simple, a huge rubber spider on a string leading into the room through a hole in the ceiling. All that was required to operate it was to pull the string, watch through a hole in the side of the room for some pour shmuck to stand under the spider, and then to let the string go. This time I got to be the poor shmuck.
    As soon as the rubbery legs of the spider touched my neck I let out a scream. I think the scream had been in there all along waiting for an excuse to come out. It was loud, but not as loud as Todd laughing. The next thing I did was bolt out the passage I had used to enter the maze.  I ran fast and I didn’t stop until I was brought up short by the next terror the maze had to offer.
    Not watching where I was going as I ran, I naturally missed the hand that was reaching blindly through one of the holes in the wall waiting for an innocent victim to come within its grasp. Lucky me, I got to be that innocent victim. The moment that arm grabbed me I nearly fainted.  But I didn’t faint. Instead, I latched onto the arm with my teeth and bit down as hard as I could. The hand released me immediately at the same time that I heard Todd howl in pain outside the maze. I knew it was Todd and that I should