No Regrets

Record’s
classifieds. She offered to sell her house and land, listing the property for half a million dollars. Even though she advertised it bothlocally and in the
Wall Street Journal,
at that price, she got no serious offers, only a few lookers. Eventually, she changed her mind, and took it off the market.
    By December 1981, Rolf had been gone for sixteen months, and Ruth said she needed some kind of resolution about their finances. Wherever her husband was, she had to live, and to do that she needed some income she could count on. Back in the spring, the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had moved to block her from getting Rolf’s eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-month pension payments. She had always resented the way Rolf handled that money because she knew he had given some of it to Elinor to help out his children.
    “All he wanted,” Kay Scheffler said, “was six hundred dollars for the house, six hundred dollars for her [meaning Ruth], and six hundred dollars for himself. Ruth told me that she said to him, ‘I’m not going to give it to you; you’re just going to give it away!’
    “He was figuring he’d give his share to his sons,” Kay continued. “She [Ruth] figured to hold on to it.”
    In her petition to be appointed trustee of Rolf’s property, Ruth complained to San Juan County Superior Court Judge Howard Patrick that she was barely scraping by. She said her current income was only about five hundred dollars a month.
    In a hearing held on December 16, Rolf and Elinor’s younger son, Erik Ekenes, twenty-one, requested that he or “some other suitable person” be appointed as the trustee—anyone but Ruth. But even Erik’s attorney acknowledged that civil law decreed that the preferred trustee of the estate of a missing or incompetent person is normally that person’s spouse. And that, of course, was Ruth.
    Judge Patrick appointed Ruth trustee—but with several conditions. The Court ordered her to file an inventory and an appraisal of the property. That would be used to fix the amount of bond she would be required to post before her trusteeship became official.
    Erik and Rolf Ekenes agreed not to interfere with Ruth’s activities in any way. They weren’t after their father’s estate, because they didn’t believe there was anything left of it. Surely, Ruth had either already spent the money or hidden it away. What they did want was some resolution and some kind of justice for their father.
    On January 8, 1982, Ruth dutifully appeared before Judge Patrick with her handwritten inventory. More realistically, she now valued her home at $266,533.73, a little more than half her asking price six months earlier. The judge ordered that 70 percent of that figure would be her bond, and he also stipulated that she could pay herself considerably more than five hundred dollars a month from income accruing to the property.
    For the moment at least, Ruth Neslund’s life took on a modicum of serenity. Rolf was still missing, but she had her home and enough to live on, and she continued to buy and sell antiques and other items ranging from furniture to small parcels of real estate.
    But any exultation Ruth may have felt over her small win in Judge Patrick’s courtroom would not last long. Sheriff Sheffer’s department had no intention of dropping their investigation into what might have happened to Rolf Neslund.
    They continued to receive hearsay and tall tales that were circulating around Lopez Island.
    All of it led exactly nowhere.
    •  •  •
    And then, Ray Clever’s reporter brother, Dick, wrote a story about the disappearance of Rolf Neslund, and it appeared under a prominent headline. It was enough to spur two women to come forward—even though they were afraid of vengeance if someone should be angry with them.
    They were Ruth’s nieces, who were concerned about the way their “Uncle Rolf” had disappeared. They weren’t sure what the true story behind that might be, but they were worried. And they wrote to the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association.
    Ruth’s older sister, Mamie, had two daughters in their thirties: Joy Stroup, who lived in Circleville, Ohio, and Donna Smith, who lived in Washington. The information the women sent puzzled those who opened mail at the Pilots’ Association, but longtime pilots Captain Gunnar Olsborg and William Henshaw followed up on the information they had sent. Both of them, especially Gunnar Olsborg, remained among Rolf’s closest friends. They read