Free The Spider's Web by Margaret Coel

shoulders.
    “How are you, Marcy?” Father John said.
    “How am I supposed to be?” The breeze caught a snatch of her blonde hair and blew it across her face. She pushed the hair back. She looked like a little girl with thin arms dangling from the sleeves of a white tee shirt and thin legs beneath the cutoff blue jeans. She wore sandals, and the dust curled over her toes. She barely reached her father’s shoulders.
    “Ned’s still dead,” she said. “Nothing’s gonna change that.”
    “FBI agent’s making things difficult,” Morrison said. “I want to take Marcy home with me...”
    The girl cut in: “I’m not going back to Oklahoma, Daddy.” She ducked out from under the large arm and looked up at her father. “We’ve been over that. It’s not happening.”
    “You’d be safe there,” he said.
    She shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Soon’s they arrest those guys, I’ll be safe in Jackson Hole. I just want to get back to my own life. I mean, I want things to go on like they were. Well, not exactly like they were, ’cause Ned’s gone and all that, and we’re never gonna be getting married like we planned.” She swung toward Father John. “You get it, don’t you, Father?”
    Father John hesitated. There was a look of desperation in the girl’s eyes, but something trivial about it, like the look in the eyes of students at the Jesuit prep school where he had taught American history, begging to be excused from yesterday’s class because they hadn’t heard the alarm. He had marked it off to the self-absorption that came with immaturity. But Marcy Morrison was no longer a teenager.
    “I’m sure you want Ned’s killers found,” he said.
    A startled look came over the girl. She flinched backward. “Well, naturally. I loved Ned.” She glanced up at her father. “We were gonna make a real family together. I mean, a really good family with everybody looking out for one another.”
    Larry Morrison drew in a long breath that expanded his chest. He cleared his throat and stared down at the girl. “No sense in going off to places the good Father here has no interest in.” He turned his attention back to Father John. “I want assurances that my daughter will be safe here.”
    “You know our so-called family was a big fake,” Marcy said.
    “Marcy, please,” her father said, and the Reverend Crispie lifted himself off the front of the Hummer and moved in closer, like a body guard, Father John thought, on full alert.
    “Everything was a lie,” the girl said, a controlled hysteria coming into her voice. “All that smiling and waving for the TV cameras, all that bullshit about how the family that stays together prospers together, only our family wasn’t exactly together, right? Not after Mom took off. I never blamed her, ’cause all I wanted to do was get the hell out myself.” She seemed to settle back inside herself. “Well, maybe I blamed her for not taking me with her. She should’ve done that.”
    “When all this is over, I want you to go back into therapy,” Morrison said. A distant note had come into his voice, as if he were counseling a parishioner.
    “Therapy!” The girl spit out the word. “You never could face it, could you? You’re the one needs therapy. Living a lie for a long time. That’s gotta take it out of you. My therapist told me that. She said I needed to distant myself from toxic relationships with my family. So I did, and I was gonna start over, get me a new family.” She started moving backward, holding out both hands. “Oh, my God. Now I get it,” she said. “You sent those Indians to kill Ned. You didn’t want me to have another family. You didn’t want me to have a new chance. You’d do anything to stop me.”
    “That’s ridiculous, Marcy,” Morrison said. “I want whatever makes you happy. I told you we could have your wedding in the palace cathedral...”
    “Where you could show the gazillion dupes—oh, excuse me, followers in the Lord of