No Regrets

“the Greek islands.”
    Harald and his wife had been planning to visit Rolf and Ruth that October so they could celebrate a number of family birthdays together. Harald had been relieved that Rolf seemed truly serene in his retirement and not especially distressed about the bridge incident. In fact, he’d written to Harald in June 1980.
    “I am very satisfied,” Rolf wrote. “I don’t need to go out anymore to sea. There is too much to do from early in the morning. The swimming pool will be ready when you arrive—hurry up and come.”
    And again, on August 4, just a week or so before Rolf disappeared, he had written his brother enthusiastically, “We are waiting for the day you come!”
    And then there was nothing. No communication at all from Rolf to his beloved siblings. Such a thing had never happened before, and they wondered if they might have offended him in some way. They didn’t want to go to America if they weren’t welcome, but there were no more calls about their planned trip in October.
    Finally, on September 10, Ruth called Harald. “She told me that there was no need for us to come to visit,” he said. “She said, ‘Rolf’s not here.’ She said he drew twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank and was going to Europe. We canceled our plans to come to Lopez.”
    On November 3, 1980, Rolf Neslund’s true birthday, his sister Eugenie had phoned the Neslund house to wish him a happy eightieth birthday. But he wasn’t there—and neither was Ruth. A stranger to Eugenie answered thephone to say Rolf wasn’t there, and Ruth had gone to visit her relatives. Although Eugenie didn’t know her, the house-sitter was Winnie Kay Stafford, one of Ruth’s closest and most devoted friends. She and her daughter had agreed to watch over the Alec Bay Road home while Ruth was gone back East.
    Winnie Kay and her daughter moved into Ruth’s house when “they”—allegedly Ruth and Rolf—“went to Massachusetts” and she stayed for two weeks. Winnie Kay didn’t actually see Rolf leave, although, when she spoke about the Neslunds’ East Coast trip, she always said “they” and “them” in referring to Ruth’s travels that fall. When the deputies questioned her later, Winnie Kay said she had received many phone calls while she was staying at Ruth’s, and she had advised callers that Ruth and Rolf were en route to Massachusetts. Winnie Kay asked Ray Clever “not to bother” Ruth with questions because it would be “a waste of time.”
    Harald and Eugenie were troubled. If Rolf had left on a trip to Europe or just to Massachusetts, surely he would have contacted them, and he almost certainly would have told them about his trips before he even left home. Now even Ruth was completely out of touch with them, and some stranger was living in their home.
    Almost four months later, when he checked with the Norwegian Consulate, Ray Clever learned that if Rolf was in Norway in the late summer and fall of 1980, he could only have stayed for ninety days. After that, as an American citizen, he would have been required to ask for an extension of his visitor’s visa. But there was no record of that at the consulate.
    Gunnar Olsborg placed ads in Washington State newspapers offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward forany information on Rolf Neslund, to no avail. Apparently, no one had seen him, and there were no takers even for a hefty reward.
    As the holiday season approached in 1980, Ruth had received sympathetic messages from her relatives and friends who were worried about her because her husband had, according to her, abandoned her.
    “Dear Ruth,” two old friends wrote, “all of us down here were stricken by the news of Rolf. Buddy told us.
    “It must have been so hard on you. You’re a strong lady, but there are limits. Hang in there, girl. We pray for you.”
    And so, as the spring of 1981 approached, Rolf Neslund remained among the missing. Ruth told the sheriff’s men how she had found his beloved Lincoln Continental on the other side of the Anacortes ferry run, apparently abandoned there. Had he driven it onto the ferry and then down the ramp to the mainland himself, or had someone else left it there? If Rolf had left his favorite car behind, how did he get to Seattle or the airport or anywhere else, for that matter?
    People on Lopez Island were used to Rolf Neslund’s being gone for weeks at a time, but that was before he retired after the West Seattle Bridge incident. Now he was