No Regrets

agitated and that before he left, oddly, he actually said he was afraid of Ruth. They had made an appointment for him to come back on August 12, when Kay Scheffler would have the title report on his house for him.
    “But he didn’t show up,” she added. “I haven’t seen him since.”
    Once he’d been alerted to the problems with his bank accounts and the fact that Kay Scheffler had paid Ruth the last of the money on her mortgage five years earlier, Rolf visited or called several old friends. Among them were Margaret Ronning and her husband. The couple had also purchased real estate from Ruth and Rolf. He stopped at the Ronnings’ house on July 29, after he left Kay’s.
    Rolf asked Margaret if they owed him or Ruth any money, and she shook her head. Like Kay, Margaret Ronning had paid off everything—to Ruth—a long time back. Rolf told Margaret, too, that he was trying to discover where all his money was, and that he’d just found out there was no money in his account in the bank he had always used.
    Rolf went back to the Ronnings’ house on August 5, but they had other company and he didn’t stay. “He said he would come back another time,” Margaret said, “but we never spoke with him again.”
    The old man had also gone to see Elinor Ekenes on those same two days—July 29 and August 5. His long-ago sweetheart saw that Rolf was very upset, and he told her he was determined to change his will. He wanted their sons to have a fair share of his assets, and he promised Elinor he would find a way to put that in his will.
    “If I die,” he said bleakly, “please see that there is an autopsy on my body.”
    Elinor had stared at him in surprise as he explained he was living in fear for his life. The slender woman told Ray Clever that it was his wife, Ruth, that Rolf was afraid of.
    It was out of character for Rolf Neslund to be afraid of anybody or any thing, but Elinor said she felt he was truly fearful. She knew from her own experience that Ruth did strange and disturbing things.
    “Sometime in the winter of 1979,” Elinor recalled, “she called our phone and asked to speak to my son, Erik. I told her that he wasn’t home, and she told me to give him a message.”
    “What was that about?” Clever asked.
    “She said, ‘Tell him his father is dead.’”
    That, of course, turned out to be untrue, but it was the kind of statement that could stop a heart in midbeat.
    Elinor told Clever that from the first month Rolf had married Ruth, he talked about leaving her. “The last time I saw him—on that Tuesday, August 5—I suggested that he should just go to Norway and not return—just stay there, because his life was so miserable. And he told me, ‘You have no idea how many times I’ve tried. They’ve always caught up with me.’”
    “They?” Clever asked. “Who would that be?”
    Elinor wasn’t sure, but she thought Rolf meant Ruth and some members of her family because she seemed to be in close touch with them, and often had her relatives staying with the Neslunds.
    “That day,” she recalled saying to Rolf, “I told him I was going to Norway in a week. But we had no plan to go together.”
    It was Elinor’s belief that Rolf feared Ruth was planningto poison him, and he was worried that, without an autopsy, she would probably get away with it.
    There was no question that Rolf Neslund was nervous about what Ruth might do, but apparently he wasn’t convinced he had only a short time to live, because after he left Elinor, he had ordered his new glasses. He obviously expected to live to wear them. His optometrist’s receptionist told Clever that Rolf had never come to pick them up. She had sent several bills to his home on Lopez Island in the fall of 1980.
    “Mrs. Neslund finally sent us a check in the first part of March—March 1981.”
    Clever realized that would have been about two weeks after he and Greg Doss had called on Ruth and begun to ask questions.
    Although Rolf had access to all that money in a retirement account, he hadn’t withdrawn any of it. However, his pension checks had been cashed, endorsed by Ruth. That was also true of his Social Security checks. That hadn’t raised any red flags because she routinely did all their banking.
    Rolf Neslund himself had left no paper trail at all. He was in the midst of life in the second week of August 1980, and then he seemed to have walked into the mist that sometimes clings to the shoreline and country roads of the San Juan