Mazemaker by Catherine Dexter, 1989.

Twelve-year-old Winnie Brown loves mazes, and she is very surprised when one shows up among all the other graffiti on the schoolyard.  The maze is painted on the ground in silver and is big enough for a person to walk through.  Winnie and her friend, Harry, try to walk the maze, but it makes them dizzy at first.  Then, a cat they’ve befriended finds its way to the center of the maze and disappears right before their eyes!

When Winnie tries to tell her mother about it, her mother doesn’t really pay attention.  Although Winnie and Harry try to explain it away as an optical illusion of some kind, Winnie is still convinced that there is something strange about the maze.  She feels drawn to it, and she tries to walk it one more time, even though Harry is afraid. 

The next thing Winnie knows is that she’s in a hedge maze.  She faints, and when she wakes up, she finds that she is being cared for by members of the Taylor family, who owned a large house in the area about a hundred years ago.

Somehow, Winnie must find the path through the maze again in order to go back home.  According to the Taylors’ creepy housekeeper, Violet Minot, the only person who really knows the maze is the mazemaker, a distant cousin of hers who disappeared many years ago.  Winnie wants very badly to return to her own time, but she fears that Mrs. Minot may have diabolical plans of her own for the mazemaker.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Themes and Spoilers

Winnie learns that a couple hundred years before the time of the Taylors and Mrs. Minot, a cousin of Mrs. Minot’s family came to live with them.  He was an orphan, and the father of the family liked him better than his sons because he was a good worker, and they were trouble-makers.  The cousin, William Sparrow, was afraid of his cousins because he knew they were jealous of him.  His grandmother was a witch, and she had taught him a little magic about mazes, like the one that was made near the village in England where he grew up.  William built the maze and used its magic to escape from his cousins, who were about to kill him.  He came to the Taylors’ time, when the maze had been built into a hedge maze and found work as the Taylors’ groundskeeper. 

However, even though William was not murdered by his cousins, they were blamed for his disappearance and looked at with suspicion for the rest of their lives. The locals, having noted their hostility toward their cousin, believed that they probably murdered William and hid his body somewhere. In the end, they were silently judged for the crime that they wanted to commit but didn’t actually commit because they never had the chance to do it. In a way, it’s a kind of justice, although Violet Minot doesn’t see it that way.

Violet Minot, one of their descendants, has been searching for years for the secret to the maze.  She believed that if her ancestors hadn’t been blamed for William’s disappearance, her family might have owned the big house and the estate around it.  She recognized William when he appeared in her time and threatened to tell everyone in the village who he was if he didn’t share the secrets of the maze with her.  To escape her, William went through the maze again and ended up in Winnie’s time.  He painted the maze on the ground where it was supposed to be, although it had been covered up by concrete for the schoolyard.  Then, William was picked up by the police for defacing public property.  His cat roamed the area and made friends with Winnie and Harry.

When Winnie goes back in time through the maze, Violet tries to use her to learn the secrets of the maze.  Winnie eventually figures out how to get home because Violet’s great-aunt tells her that there should be an extra turn in the maze, one that isn’t marked, which she made by accident before. Can Winnie and William both outwit Violet and get back to the times where they both belong? Where does William even belong? If he can’t go back to where he came from, where should he go?

The story ends happily and something that Winnie knows from her time settles the matter of where William should live the rest of his life. There is one person in time who loves him and never stopped looking for him when he disappeared from her time. William’s time quandary and the existence of his magic maze have accidentally trapped other people in time, and when he resolves his problem and decides where he really belongs, he is able to free the others who were trapped and put an end to the magic.