Page 49 of A Dead End Wedding

“That’s a good eight feet long,” Aunt Ruby said. “There’s no way we can jump over it.”

“We’ll have to go back,” Eleanor said, turning around.

“Wait,” Lorraine said. “I have an idea.”

She put her backpack down on the ground, reached in, and pulled out a pocket-sized pair of pruning shears, which she waved in the air, grinning at us. “Nobody said we couldn’t use these.”

“They didn’t say we could,” Eleanor gasped.

“Ask forgiveness rather than permission,” I said happily. “Hand those over. I brought my gardening gloves.”

I gloved up and took a stab—literally—at breaking through the hedge on my right, calculating that the hedge on our left was the outside of the maze. I didn’t want to look through a hole in the shrubbery to see the queen’s outraged face looking back at me.

The shears broke on the first try, snapping back against my hand. “Ouch!”

Aunt Ruby put a hand on the vine and pulled at it. “This is like steel wire. We’re not going to cut through that.”

“Then let’s go back!” Eleanor, now in the lead since we’d reversed course, trotted back toward the entrance where we’d come in.

Which was no longer there.

We stopped to decide what to do next, and a baby goat came out of nowhere and raced down the path toward us. The goat took a sharp right turn and went down what had been the middle path before.

“Feels like a clue,” I said. “Instead of a white rabbit, we get a white goat.”

“This seems like a bad idea,” Aunt Ruby said, but she didn’t try to talk us out of it.

So, we followed a baby goat deep into the heart of a magical maze for a good five minutes.

And then an orangutan jumped out of the hedge, grabbed the baby goat, and raced off down a very narrow passageway on the left we would have missed if not for them.

“Okay. I went along with following the goat, but I’m drawing the line at following the orangutan,” Aunt Ruby said.

“Remember when Sherlock rescued that pair of baby orangutans and he kept calling them orangutangs, and he didn’t believe us when we tried to correct him?” Eleanor laughed. “Then he finally looked it up, and he brought me a container of Tang as a joking apology.”

“Whatever happened to Tang?” Aunt Ruby asked. “Tess loved that stuff.”

“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory. “It’s still around, only they mostly sell it overseas.”

“It’s no wonder you win all the trivia contests,” Eleanor said. “Why, I bet?—”

“Can wefocus?” Lorraine gritted out. “Just, I don’t know. Maybe we’d be better off looking for the middle of the maze now and talking about monkeys and orange drinks later?”

“Yes. I agree,” I said quickly. “But orangutans aren’t monkeys. Technically, they’re classified as great apes.”

“What’s the diff?—”

“Later!” Lorraine shouted, cutting off Eleanor’s question. “Are we following thegreat apeor not?”

“You’re the leader, but why don’t we go that way?” Aunt Ruby asked, pointing.

We all looked and saw a flashing golden arrow that literally pointed down the path to our right.

“That can’t be good,” I said. “Do you really trust a floating arrow in a Fae maze? I’ve told you, they can’t lie, but it’s very rare they tell the truth. Nobody said, ‘this is the way to the center.’ They just put a wildly obvious, ‘of course the ignorant mortals will follow this,’ arrow in the middle of the path.”

“Do we follow it or not? If we use reverse psychology, then they’ll expect us to be suspicious andnotfollow the golden floaty arrow when it’s really the actual path,” Eleanor mused.

Lorraine groaned and rubbed her temples. “My brain hurts. Okay, we’ve been in here nearly an hour and gotten nowhere. How about we take our first water break and think about it? Maybe another clue will pop up.”

---