No Regrets

‘kind grandmother type.’ Ruth had many good points to her personality, and she certainly could be entertaining at a get-together,” Caputo said wryly, “but I’m also sure that Adolf Hitler had some good attributes.”
    When the Neslunds had one of their fights, it was always Rolf who volunteered to spend the night at the Islander-Lopez Resort’s motel/apartments. “By the next day, they’d be back together,” Caputo remembered.
    Joe Caputo was a quiet and thoughtful man who kept his personal opinions hidden. That may have been why Ruth didn’t resent him the way she did Ray Clever.
    If Ruth thought that her tattling on them to Sheriff Ray Sheffer would make Doss and Clever back off, she was mistaken. Her indignation only made them more skeptical.
    Caught in what were clearly lies, Ruth grew irate at the deputies’ persistence. They were snooping into her personal life, pestering a poor woman whose husband had left her alone, acting as if she had done something wrong when they should have been more sympathetic. She was the one who’d been victimized. She was a longtimeresident on Lopez Island and she deserved some respect.
    Many of her neighbors echoed her feelings. Yes, there were a few Lopezians who liked to perpetuate rumors, but most people who knew Ruth said they couldn’t imagine that she was capable of doing real harm. She was kind and friendly, and not that different from other island women in their sixties, familiar—even beloved—by some.
    Not everyone was pleased to know that the San Juan County sheriff’s deputies were worrying Ruth with their daily visits. A lot of neighborhood women felt sympathy for her. Her health wasn’t that good, and still she had tried to keep her garden up, out there in soggy weather planting bulbs and flowers, or inside cooking for friends. No one to help her with chores, or comfort her when it grew dark at four in the afternoon in the wintertime. Ruth had a good business head, sure, but basically she was only an ordinary woman, aging, fighting weight gains, and now deserted by her husband after twenty years of marriage. Ruth had her sixty-first birthday on February 8. She spent it all alone.
    “Rolf didn’t even send her so much as a birthday card,” one woman tsk-tsked. “He always sent cards to everyone, but not to his own wife.”
    On February 25, for the third day in a row, a sheriff’s police cruiser turned into the lane leading to the Neslund house. This time, Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy accompanied Deputy Ray Clever. Ruth knew Rod, at least, and felt he would be nicer to her than Ray Clever.
    They found Ruth Neslund still maintaining that Rolf had run away with Elinor Ekenes. She embellished her recall of Elinor’s impact on her marriage even more. She believed her marriage would never have fallen apart if shehadn’t had to deal with the woman who bore Rolf’s sons.
    Ruth told the investigators that she remembered more now about the arguments she and Rolf had just prior to his leaving. They had definitely been about Elinor.
    “He wanted to give money to her,” she said indignantly. “Fifteen thousand dollars! He was putting pressure on me to let him give that woman fifteen thousand dollars of our money. It was my money, too.”
    That had upset her terribly, Ruth said, because she was the one who brought most of the money into their bank accounts. She was the one with the business head who made investments, paid their bills, took care of everything so that Rolf didn’t have to worry about it. All he had to do was ask her for whatever cash he wanted. It was always there in the dresser drawer for him. But not to give to Elinor.
    Tvrdy and Clever nodded sympathetically as she talked. After her first unexpected encounter with Clever, Ruth had regrouped and seemed quite confident that he believed what she said. She didn’t know that the investigators had made some inquiries at the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, the organization Rolf had belonged to for years, where, as its oldest member, he was a popular “grand old man.” The pilots and their wives had had a number of parties since the prior August.
    The last one had been in January. Of course, Rolf didn’t attend—but Ruth did. And she had quite a bit to drink at the party. One couple there recalled that she’d made an odd remark. She’d said, “Rolf won’t be coming home again; Rolf’s in heaven.”
    Tvrdy asked her about that now, and she shook her head dismissively. “No,