No Regrets

to visit at the Neslund home in the summer.
    Public records indicate that she had been forced to deal with the facts about Rolf’s young sons a year or two after she married him. Elinor had filed a paternity suit in North Vancouver, British Columbia, claiming Rolf was her sons’ father, and that he should be supporting them.
    Rolf was ordered by the court to support young Rolf and Erik, and he actually did that until 1970, when they became beneficiaries of his Social Security dependents’ benefits. Ruth wrote the checks in the family, and it must have been galling for her to see the bank accounts that were so important to her lowered by the needs of the boys, constant reminders of Rolf’s affair with Elinor.
    Even though Rolf would have had to notify Social Security offices in 1970 and verify that Rolf and Erik were his sons for them to collect from his account, Ruth was still adamant that she didn’t know that firsthand. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said flatly. “I’m pretty sure that he [Rolf] signed every document that their mother put in front of him.”
    While Ruth denied that she knew anything at all about the boys purported to be her husband’s children, the rest of her memory was impeccable. She recalled every single financial deal she had ever been involved in. Her mind was like a big steel filing cabinet, full of details that proved her business acumen.
    The Neslunds never had children together, possibly because Ruth was in her forties when they married. But she kept in touch with about a dozen of her nieces and nephews and was very close to her niece Donna, who wasa frequent visitor in Ruth and Rolf’s home. Ruth was something of a surrogate mother to her. Ruth claimed that Donna didn’t like her own mother, Ruth’s older sister Mamie, and that she was trying to effect a reconciliation. In the meantime, she welcomed Donna into her home. And so did Rolf.
    The first ten years of the Neslunds’ marriage passed quietly, and they weren’t at all newsworthy. They were simply an older couple living in a very nice home set far back off the road in a sheltered cove of Lopez Island.
    But over the next decade, their relationship took an ominously violent turn.

Three
    Financially, the Neslunds had done extremely well as they approached their twentieth wedding anniversary. Rolf had his salary, and Ruth’s dabblings in real estate were paying off. She acquired two lots in Port Townsend, and two more in Anacortes, the first city on the mainland where ferries from the islands docked. The Anacortes lots had come about in trade for a high-powered boat engine Rolf owned.
    “Rolf did it,” she said, proudly. “Sight unseen by both parties.”
    The early building lots Ruth bought cost no more than $800 originally, and she didn’t make a huge profit on them. But by the late seventies, she was much more savvy. On one day in May, she bought two lots for a total of $18,000 and turned them around in two months, selling them for a $4,400 profit. She bought another in Bellingham for $3,000, knowing she could sell it the next day for more than double that. She usually had her buyers lined up before she purchased the properties; she didn’t even have to use her own money in the purchases: That came out of her profit.
    While she was paying off the mortgage on the Alec Bay house, Ruth began collecting cars and other valuables: a motor home, a Dodge van, a classic 1966 Mustang, a LincolnContinental, an Oldsmobile convertible, farm trailers and boat trailers, a twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, Duncan Phyfe tables and other antiques, a coin collection, silver flatware. She registered the cars illegally in Louisiana, “because it was cheaper there,” and used an ambiguous “R. Neslund” as the name of the registered owner, which could have been either Ruth or Rolf.
    Ruth acquired horses, buggies, and more houses on Lopez Island itself, and sold them on contract with 12 percent interest coming to her. Without striving to remember, she could tally up every single asset she had, how much she owed, how much was owed her—at what interest— and she never had to glance at notes. She knew how much was in each of many bank accounts.
    When Rolf retired, he would receive a pension of $1,800 each month from the Puget Sound Pilots.
    They were doing very well indeed.
    But that was on the business side of their union.
    Over the years, Ruth and Rolf Neslund extended their evening cocktail hours further and further