“That’s just it! She stayed and kept you at home on purpose. I don’t mean she actually committed the murder, but she instigated it.”
“And who was her accomplice?”
“Stryker, the house man, of course.”
Avice began to be a little interested. She had never really liked Stryker. He seemed to her shifty and deceitful. “But how?” she asked.
“Easy enough. The man simply took a knife from the kitchen, followed his master to the woods, and waylaid him.”
“How did he know Uncle Rowly was going to the woods?”
“He telephoned him at his office to go to Van Cortlandt Park. You remember the stenographer said the man who telephoned called Mr. Trowbridge ‘Uncle’.”
“And Stryker did that?”
“Yes; to be misleading.”
“But Stryker didn’t know Kane Landon had come on from the West.”