Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

told me what they’ve seen and heard.”
    “Right,” she said.
    “I need you to fill in those gaps a little bit,” Stabler said. “All three know—to an extent—what’s taken place.”
    “What did you ask me?” Mary said vaguely.
    “To tell me what happened.”
    Again, she said she wasn’t ready to do that yet. As Stabler and Stuesher spoke about her children and what the events of the past twenty-four hours might mean to them, she listened quietly. And when she finally spoke, she talked not of her own complicity but of her concern for Matthew. And what newspapers might say about him.
    “No matter what, in the end, I don’t want it…umm, I don’t want him smeared.”
    Mary Winkler talked in circles, saying that she didn’t know what words to use to explain what had happened. “Sometimes I think something might have happened and then, there’s no way …”
    “Did he hurt you?”
    “Not physically.”
    Stan Stabler asked Mary if she knew her husband’s condition at the present time, and she said she didn’t.
    “Was he alive when you left the house, or do you know for sure?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Mary,” he asked quietly. “Why did you shoot him?” She didn’t answer.
    “Had you planned ahead of time to shoot him—or did it happen, just on the spur of the moment?”
    “Not planned.”
    Mary’s answers came in one or two words, pulled with agonizing slowness out of a memory that she insisted was blurry. She was not sure of when it had happened. She knew that the shotgun was kept on top of their closet. Matthew had used it to hunt turkeys. She kept saying that she could “surely not” have shot her husband. She had never shot that gun. She kept denying that she had shot Matthew, but then she went back in her mind to the time when she was driving away from Selmer the day before.
    “Driving down the road, something would go in my head, and I’d thought there is no way, what had just happened, and then I hadn’t really seen anything or heard anything. I’ve used my name everywhere I went…And this was just my last time to be with them, and we were just going to have some fun. I just wanted to be with them before they had bad days—have a happy day.”
    Mary murmured that she wanted to have one last happy time with her little girls, and that was why she had driven them to the pristine beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever else happened, she wanted them to remember this day they had spent together, having fun, making good memories that she hoped would one day obscure whatever bad memories they had.
    As vague as she was, she seemed to know she was in a great deal of trouble, so much trouble that she might never be able to spend any happy days with her daughters again, perhaps not until they were grown women. She had planned to get them to Matthew’s parents, who were on vacation, by Friday.
    They were “good people,” she said. “They’re the family.”
    She spoke now about Matthew. She had been thinking about him and about how he had so many rules and schedules for her to follow, everything “in this certain order.
    “I love him dearly,” she said, “but gosh, he just nailed me to the ground. I was real good for quite some time. My problem was I got a job at the post office a couple of years ago—and the first of our marriage. I just took it like a mouse. Didn’t think anything different. My mom just took it from my dad, and that stupid scenario. And I got a job where I had to have nerve and high self-esteem, and I have been battling this for years…For some time, at some point, it was really good. Then, I don’t know. We moved over a year ago—February ’05—and it just came back out for some reason.”
    “He would knock your self-esteem down?”
    “Uh—no. Uh, just chewing, whatever. And that’s the problem. I have nerve now and I have self-esteem. So my ugly came out.”
    It was an unfortunate phrase for her to use, and Mary Winkler would hear it repeated over and over in the media in the months to come.
    My ugly came out.
    Mary tried to make excuses for Matthew, for what he did to push her over the edge. Even though he had controlled her, kept her on his schedule, undermined her self-confidence, she wanted the two investigators to know that Matthew was “so good—so good, too. It was just a weakness. I think a lot of times, he had high blood pressure, but he’d never go enough to the doctor to get medicine for it. He was a mighty fine person, and