No Regrets

no—that’s not what I said. I said, ‘Rolf would be in seventh heaven if only he could be here!’”
    “What do you think Rolf is using for money?” the undersheriff asked her.
    “He told me when he left that he’d be taken care of by the Ekeneses.”
    Later, although Ruth seemed to have an answer for everything, she finally outright admitted to Tvrdy and Clever that she had lied to them about going to Norway in October. Yes, she had left the island two months after Rolf walked out on her, but she hadn’t flown to Norway. Instead, she had gone to Louisiana to visit her son and other relatives who lived there.
    Now her story became really convoluted: She said she had been so mortified, knowing Rolf was with Elinor, that she hadn’t even told her good friends and relatives what the real story was. She told one Lopez Island friend that she was going to Norway, and another that she was going to Louisiana.
    “You see, I read a letter that was addressed to Rolf, and sent to the Pilots’ Association,” she said sadly. “It was from Elinor. Rolf always told me that he didn’t want a divorce from me. But Elinor sued us for seventy-five thousand dollars to support her two sons. She was going to cause trouble for Rolf by telling that he lied about his age back in 1917 so he could get his first-mate papers. He said he was born in 1897, but he was really born in 1900.”
    That was true enough, but the sheriff’s investigators didn’t realize at the time of this interview that this was a story very similar to what Ruth had told Rolf two decades before to keep him from leaving her. It had worked then, and now she used another version of it to bolster her story about his elopement at the age of eighty with Elinor.
    “Just before Rolf left me, he told my brother Robertthat Robert had to stay here with me,” she added, explaining that her brother had been visiting them in August. “He told my brother, ‘She’s going to need you,’ and I realized then that Rolf was going to be gone a long time.”
    One thing that Sheriff Sheffer and his detectives knew about Ruth cast a shadow of doubt over her version of the end of her marriage: Just as Ray Clever had once told her, it had been easy to check on her travels the previous fall. Clever had simply contacted all the airlines that flew from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport to Norway. Ruth Neslund’s name didn’t appear on any of their passenger manifests on October 10 or any other date in October 1980. Before she ever admitted her lies to them, they knew the truth.
    Even more interesting, they knew exactly where Elinor Ekenes was, and Rolf wasn’t with her. Elinor might have traveled to Norway, but she had gone with another man— her new husband. They learned that she and Rolf had remained friends through the years, but she was anything but a femme fatale who was trying to lure him away from his wife.
    The investigators allowed Ruth to ramble on about her theories, knowing all the while that Rolf’s disappearance had nothing whatsoever to do with Elinor.

Six
    Although he had emigrated to America, Rolf had kept in constant contact with his family in Norway. Working with Interpol in Oslo, Ray Clever learned that none of his siblings or other relatives had heard from him.
    Even before they heard from his friend Gunnar Olsborg, Rolf Neslund’s brothers and sister had become very concerned. Harald Naeslund, from the city of Drummond, and Eugenie Naeslund Lindboe, who lived in Oslo (both used the Norwegian spelling for their last name), had always been in close touch with Rolf, and the family not only had rituals they observed on special days, but they had planned to visit Ruth and Rolf in October 1980.
    Naeslund was a well-known name in Norway, particularly in the shipping industry. Rolf’s siblings were quite wealthy now and owned a shipping line in their native country. They could well afford to visit him and Ruth in America, and he looked forward to having them in his home.
    But Eugenie had received a strange phone call in October 1980, from Lopez Island, from Ruth—not Rolf. “I was missing Rolf,” Eugenie said, “and we talked about him. She said he was gone, and she didn’t know where. Ruth and I said we would call each other if we saw him. Shesaid she wanted to come to Norway and talk to me. She said she would come in a fortnight. She never called me again.”
    Eugenie recalled that Ruth said later in that phone call that she thought that Rolf had gone to