No Regrets

signed by Ruth.
    There were endless paper trails for Ruth. She had continued her life without a ripple. On August 14, only days after Rolf left her, Ruth put an ad in the
Friday Harbor Journal,
paying $9.10 to offer several items for sale: “Commercial meat grinder $550.00. Antique sewing machine $50. Potbelly Stove, $100. Office furniture, sofa, and chair—$125. Record-A-Call $350, Steel desk, $100. AND 1968 Plymouth 9-Passenger Station Wagon—$500, 1964 Ford Fairlane 500—$450, 1955 Mustang Fastback, pony seats, $2,000.”
    How odd that she put Rolf’s prize Mustang up for sale almost before the door slammed behind him. . . .
    Ray Clever wondered what might have occurred during the first ten days of August 1980 that would have caused a major rift between Rolf and Ruth. They had battled with words, fingernails, household objects, and fists foryears—but they continued to live together, however uneasy the détente.
    Clever suspected that there had been some kind of a sea change that summer, something so cataclysmic that there was no going back. Several of Rolf’s longtime friends had visited at his home or run into him in June and July 1980. They recalled that he was happy—“bouncy” almost, one said. He was in such good physical condition that he seemed barely to have aged in the last few decades. His mind was described as “very sharp,” and he had the muscles of a much younger man.
    And then Ray Clever met a woman who had information that helped him find a loose end in the tangled skein of conflicting stories. He pulled at it and began to unravel the case by talking to a colorful witness named Kay Scheffler, who lived in the north end of Seattle. Kay was an old and platonic friend of Rolf’s, a large, rumpled-looking woman who resembled Marie Dressler or Marjorie Main as they looked when they played “Tugboat Annie” and “Ma Kettle” in famous movies of the past.
    Kay told Clever that Rolf had come down to Seattle on July 29, 1980. He told her that he needed some cash, and he hadn’t asked Ruth for any that day, so he had gone to one of their banks to cash a seventy-five-dollar check.
    “They wouldn’t cash it for him,” Kay said. “They told him he had insufficient funds.”
    Puzzled and sure that it had to be a mistake, Rolf had stopped in to see Kay Scheffler. She loaned him thirty dollars. And then Rolf asked her about the mortgage he and Ruth held on the house she had bought from them.
    “He asked me when I would be paying it off,” Kay said. “And I told him, ‘Rolf, I paid that loan off in 1975—five years ago. I paid Ruth.’
    “He was shocked.”
    Rolf had told Kay Scheffler that Ruth said the loan to her hadn’t been paid off. He himself had no idea about how much money he had—Ruth was in charge of that. She was the one who collected his retirement pension, and any other money due them. She did all the banking.
    “He said he gave Ruth power of attorney to do all that,” Kay told Ray Clever.
    Rolf was suddenly concerned; he didn’t know where his money was, and it sure wasn’t in the bank where he had tried to cash a check. He thought he had close to eighty thousand dollars in that account. Now, at his age, even though he was healthy, he was facing his own mortality. “He said he wanted to change his will so that he could leave something to his sons,” Kay told Clever. “I told him I’d try to help him, and he said he would be back to see me on August 5.”
    Rolf Neslund came to Kay Scheffler’s house again on the fifth, and he told her he had taken care of some of his problems. Without Ruth’s knowledge, he had secretly taken the power of attorney document out of their safe.
    “He thought that’s all he had to do,” Kay said. “That, if he had the papers, Ruth couldn’t say what to do with his money. I told him that wasn’t enough—that he had to hire a lawyer to revoke her power of attorney.”
    Rolf then asked Kay if she’d help him find an attorney and she said she would. He was also worried because he’d found out that Ruth had applied for a mortgage loan on their Lopez home—which had been free and clear for years. But she hadn’t told him anything about that. Rolf wanted help getting the title so he could see what was going on. He told Kay he also intended to see that his pension payments from the PugetSound Pilots’ Association came directly to him—and not to Ruth.
    “I told him I’d help him,” Kay said, adding that Rolf had been