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dinner. Around seven. No one we could find at the school could recall seeing him after dinnertime.” Dr. Clapp peered at me over the tops of his half-moon lenses. “We have investigated this case very thoroughly. The local police have been most cooperative. Everyone of any consequence—and several of no consequence whatever—at the school has been interrogated. Mr. Gresham’s room has been secured and thoroughly searched and examined. Everything that has been found—and there really wasn’t much; Mr. Gresham appears to have lived a simple life—only seems to confirm our conclusion.”
    “Please tell me about your medical—your pathological—findings.”
    Dr. Clapp removed his glasses and rubbed them absent-mindedly on the front of his white smock. Then he placed them back on the bridge of his nose, hooking them over each ear with the crook of his forefinger. He moved some papers on his desk, then held up a manila folder. He peered at the writing on the tab. “Here it is.” He opened it in front of him and extracted a sheaf of black-and-white photographs. He handed them to me. “Police photos. The body as it was found on the beach.” One showed Gresham’s body curled fetally on the shimmering wet sand, necktie loosened around his throat, dress shirt with cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms, oxfords laced to his feet. A close-up focused on what had been George Gresham’s face—a white, pulpy mass, oddly bloodless, jagged bits of bone around his nose and eye sockets, forehead laid open so that a big flap of pale flesh hung down over his brow. And his eyes—his eyes were gone. The photos showed dozens of tiny sandcrabs in the act of pecking and jabbing at the empty places where Gresham’s eyes had been. There were pockmarks on his face and the backs of his hands. “What you see are mostly wounds made by seagulls. They had only begun on his face and the backs of his hands. If the body had washed up somewhere else, and had not been discovered by the girl jogging on the beach the morning after he died, there would have been little more than a skeleton and teeth left.” I shuddered.
    I held up one of the close-ups, which showed Gresham’s fist clenched tightly against his chest. “What’s the significance of this?”
    “Cadaveric spasm,” he replied. “Interesting phenomenon. That photo suggests that Mr. Gresham was immersed in the ocean at the moment he died. Notice—you can see it pretty clearly—” the doctor jabbed at the photograph with his blunt forefinger “—the string of seaweed in his hand. What happens is that the fists clench spasmodically at the precise instant of death. Different from the gradual stiffening of the muscles in rigor mortis. This is one powerful, final electric impulse from brain to hand. The grip can be superhuman. So we know with certainty that this man was clutching at seaweed at the moment his heart beat for the last time. Presumably somewhere at the bottom of the sea. That particular variety of seaweed, our biologists tell me, is a sort of moss that grows only on rocks under the water, so we can pretty well eliminate the possibility that he was out of water at the instant of his death.”
    I stared at the picture of George Gresham’s fist for a moment, trying to imagine the frantic desperation of a man being sucked along the ocean’s floor, grasping at the slimy rocks as death struck him. I passed the photos back to the doctor.
    “Now these,” he continued, handing me a second sheaf of pictures, “are the pathological photographs. You’ll see immediately why we decided to autopsy the body.”
    I saw. George Gresham’s nude body lay flat on a narrow chrome table. It was a mass of scrapes, tears, welts, and bumps. It had undergone a terrible beating from ankle to skull. Hardly a square inch had been left unmarked.
    “It looks like he was beaten up and kicked around,” I said.
    “Doesn’t it!” Dr. Clapp’s voice echoed the horror that I felt. I liked him for