An hour later, I huddled next to Finch as we walked through a frigid park where Doyle Eldridge’s son told us his dad liked to go after his daily walk to the coffee shop. Nine benches and several mistaken identities later, we found Doyle leaning against a bald cypress, his head buried in the pages of a Patricia Cornwell book about Jack the Ripper. He sensed our presence, wiped his eyes, and looked up.
“Hello, Miss Jax,” he said. “I knew you’d come.”
“How?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on things.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” Finch said. “She asked you a question. Answer it.”
“Would you like to know a fun fact?” Doyle asked. “I’ve known Alexandra since grade school. We were in the same class in the first and fourth grades, you see. My family moved away when school ended after my fourth year, and we lost touch for a while until I moved back again in the eleventh grade. I’ll never forget the day we sat in English class when she looked at me and said she was going to be a famous writer one day.”
He definitely was odd. With each reply, his head bobbed around like there wasn’t enough support to hold it up.
“If Alexandra has known you all these years, why didn’t she ever tell anyone?”
“Why was it important for them to know? It was no one’s business. I guess you could say I was a confidant, someone she could talk to like she would a girlfriend. She didn’t have any of those, but she always had me.”
What she had was a plethora of hidden doors, each containing its own unique secret.
“Barbara Berry didn’t see you as Alexandra’s friend. She saw you as her stalker.”
He shrugged. “I know.”
“And?”
“She’s entitled to her opinion. It doesn’t make it true.”
“It doesn’t make it a lie either. Did you give Alexandra a scrapbook where you’d pasted your head and Alexandra’s head onto a bride and groom?”
He beamed with pride. “Matter of fact, I did.”
“Why?”
He snapped shut the book he was holding, stood, folded his arms in front of him. “I don’t see how answering any of your questions is going to help you find what you’re really after.”
“It might. You were obsessed with Alexandra. Isn’t that true?”
“Wasn’t everyone?”
“Everyone didn’t take the time to make her a scrapbook,” I said. “You did. Did you love her?”
He nodded. “I did.”
“Must have been hard when you found out she was in love with someone else.”
“If you mean Mr. Sinclair, I’ve known about him for years. And you’re right. It would have been grand if she had loved me the way I loved her, but she didn’t. I pasted our faces into the scrapbook to remind her of something she once gave to me when we were in grade school. Just a little card one Valentine’s Day. I wanted to know if she still remembered. She did.”
“Where were you the night she was murdered?” I asked.
“At home, with my son, just like I told police.”
“All night?”
“All night. The love I had for Alexandra was the kind of love a brother has for his sister, not a man for a woman. It wasn’t sexual, and it wasn’t wrong.”
Aside from his odd behavior, which I assumed may have just been the way he’d always been, I believed him. “Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time.”
“You came all this way to talk to me and you’re not even going to ask me about the book?”
“What book?”
“The one Alexandra was writing when she died.”
“How do you know about it?”
“I told you, we were friends. She knew she could talk to me about anything and I’d keep quiet.”
“Who was the subject of the book?”
“She was.”
“Alexandra?”
He nodded.
“I don’t follow. She writes about criminals, just like I do. Why would she be the subject of her own book?”
He raised a brow. “You’re assuming the book was the same kind she’d written before. It wasn’t. It was the story of her life. Her memoir.”