Andy Jovanovich thought it was strange when he saw an elderly man in red pajamas walking in a driving rain late Wednesday night, but he noted a house nearby with lights on and thought maybe that was his home.

What’s more, he said to himself, “Hey, this is Vashon. People do a lot of weird stuff.”

In the days that followed, Jovanovich, like many Islanders, was gripped by the drama of Jack Randles, an 83-year-old Vashon resident with Alzheimer’s disease who walked away from the home he shares with his son early Wednesday evening and vanished — for nearly three full days.

But for Jovanovich, the drama carried a personal twist. That observation late Wednesday night — when Jovanovich was leaving a friend’s house on Luana Beach Road — turned out to be the last confirmed sighting of the elderly man until he turned up in a $1 million waterfront home Saturday afternoon, asleep and in bed.

Had the story not ended happily, Jovanovich noted, he would have felt terrible. “I was really relieved when they found him,” he said.

So were many Islanders — hundreds of whom got swept up in the drama of his disappearance, the massive search and an ending that had a fairy tale quality to it. “Am I a terrible person for thinking of Goldilocks right now?” asked one woman in a comment she posted about Randles’ discovery on The Beachcomber’s website.

Exactly what happened is not completely certain, as Jack Randles, according to his son Marty Randles, doesn’t remember a thing. He walked out of his home on Deppman Road sometime Wednesday evening, clad in his pajamas and sneakers but with his glasses left behind, and was found Saturday afternoon in a home on Luana Beach Road, two miles away.

The homeowners are on vacation; at the family’s request, the exact address of the home is not being disclosed. The homeowners’ daughter, who lives nearby, checked on the house Saturday afternoon, saw some blood on the front steps and called 911.

When authorities arrived, according to George Brown, the assistant fire chief at Vashon Island Fire & Rescue, they found Randles had changed his clothes, apparently eaten and was asleep in one of the beds.

“He has a few scratches, scrapes and bruises. But all in all, he’s in pretty good spirits,” his son Marty said Monday.

Randles — who’s age was misstated in many of the Facebook posts and on some of the fliers — moved to Vashon in 1975, his family said. A former Marine, he spent the last quarter of his working life at Boeing, where he started out as a riveter and worked his way up to becoming a change board chairman, managing engineering changes in aircraft production.

Randles helped to build the house he lives in with his son Jory on Deppman Road — a split-level home with sweeping views of Tramp Harbor. Tall and lean, he loved to walk and was in good physical shape, Marty said.

But his Alzheimer’s disease — diagnosed a few years ago — was progressing rapidly. About a year ago, Marty Randles realized Jack shouldn’t be driving anymore and took two months off work to help his father manage that difficult transition, he said.

Ironically, Marty was gearing up to help his father with the next difficult transition — moving into a specialized care unit at a nursing home in West Seattle — when he disappeared. The family had made a deposit only weeks before at the nursing home and Marty had scheduled a month off, beginning this week, to help with the move.

Marty, a Metro bus driver who used to live on Vashon, couldn’t help but wonder if his father’s remarkable journey was the last hurrah of a man who had lived life fully. His doctor, he said, wondered the same thing.

“I’m sure he sensed it,” he said of his father’s imminent move.

Randles’ disappearance triggered a remarkable search effort, with around 40 people involved Thursday and 60 on Friday — a deployment that included volunteer teams from King, Pierce and Kitsap counties, a helicopter equipped with a heat-seeking camera that can detect a body deep in the woods and a patrol boat that searched the shoreline. King County Search & Rescue,  which oversaw the effort, set up the command post at the Vashon Golf & Swim Club, where King County Sheriff’s Dep. Rich Barton, the incident commander, pored over maps and directed the dozens of teams.

“We have a lot of resources here,” Barton said Friday as he stood in a parking lot filled with SUVs bearing search and rescue insignia.

The searchers — including 18 members of Vashon’s own Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) — covered nearly all of Maury, traipsing through woods, looking into sheds, peering under stairways and even looking into the windows of empty houses, Brown said. Because the search was conducted under “exigent circumstances,” meaning a life was hanging in the balance, searchers had the authority to go onto private party, said Michael Cochrane, who with his wife Catherine heads Vashon’s CERT.

Twice, the search was called off, first on Friday morning and then on Saturday, because authorities said they had no place left to search and the trail had gone cold. Authorities at the time called them hard decisions. “You don’t want to give up,” Sgt. Katie Larson, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s department, said at one point.

The search was reactivated Friday, after authorities received Jovanovich’s tip as well as some other possible sightings, Brown said. When the search was again called off on Saturday, several Islanders expressed concern, and authorities, in response to that concern, were just beginning to redeploy when they got the call from Luana Beach Road.

On Monday, after the intense, two-day search had ended, many were still marveling over the roller-coaster event— one that had many assuming the worst after last week’s spate of below-freezing weather.

“My worst fear was finding a body somewhere,” said Hank Lipe, chief of Vashon Island Fire & Rescue. “I’m just ecstatic that our best-case scenario played out — that he was inside a house, alive and well.”

Marty Randles, who drove around the Island conducting his own search over the course of his father’s disappearance, said he felt an enormous sense of gratitude toward the many men and women who looked for Randles. At one point, as he stood in the parking lot at the golf club, he grew tearful.

“I’m just overwhelmed and grateful for the outpouring of support,” he said.

Jovanovich, who showed up at the command post at one point to see if he could help, said Monday he continues to think about that moment when he saw Randles shuffling up the hill toward Point Robinson Park in a torrential rain. That he survived and found his way into a luxury home made Jovanovich feel nothing but awe for the elderly man.

“What a resilient guy,” he said.  “He may have Alzheimer’s. But he knows he wants to live.”