“And one way,” MacDonald noted. “This monster—how did it leave? The tracks are clear from here, then they go almost to the water’s edge, walk along it for a bit—I assume that area of no prints is a high tide mark—and then… what? Sir Robert gets into the water, the thing doesn’t enter but tracks him, and then suddenly it gets Sir Robert and flings him a good ten feet inward of the breakers. So we assume that Sir Robert wasn’t far enough out, or somehow came in to where this thing could reach, and it plucked him out.”

“You’re soundin’ as if you think it was a real creature.”

“For now we’ll stick with it, but that leaves me with a real problem. Okay, so the thing gets its claws on Sir Robert, lifts him up, does him in, and drops him on the beach. Now what does it do?”

“Huh? Um, yeah, I see what y’mean. No return footprints.”

“It doesn’t fly away—some of the prehistoric monsters bigger than that could do it, but they’d take a mile of runway at the minimum and really mess up the beach. If somebody hoisted it out, in broad daylight, such a ship or derrick large enough would be seen by the town or by the whole damn island and sure as hell couldn’t be broken down in—what was the gap?”

“No more’n two hours between death and discovery, or so Doc says.”

The younger man nodded. “All right, then. So the only place it might go is into the water—its stride and the high tide might mask that. But if it could stomach the water, then why didn’t it just wade in after Sir Robert? Why play cat and mouse and then wait to hoist him inland?”

“Maybe it’s perverse. Cats like to play with mice and rats a long time before they kill ’em. Who knows what somethin’ like this’d be like?”