hell and that would be the end of the debate.” His voice took on a desperate, panicked quality. “I’d saved a few bad ones so I could match the calibrations on the tests I messed with. So I put one in. All that should have happened was a stall. That’s all. Not a wreck. It couldn’t cause a wreck. Like the Ryland guy said, it couldn’t get dangerous without a torque or collision. When he was killed, I couldn’t believe it. I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”
He blinked hard, looking away, his face crumpled as he fought tears.
Tara looked at Dylan, whose mouth was a grim line, his eyes full of sorrow. She felt the same way, burning with outrage, swamped with sadness. Such a waste. Such a tragedy. So many people hurt. And all over a rumor. Her father would never have closed down Wharton.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Matt asked, looking like a prisoner about to be hanged. “I swear I didn’t know this could happen.”
“We need you to repeat your story for the police,” Dylan said. “And we want a statement certifying that the drive assembly units Ryland provided Wharton Electronics were functional, that you rigged the test results. Agreed?”
“Whatever you say,” he said miserably. “I’m done for no matter what. Jeb will fire me. With the baby coming, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“One step at a time, Matt,” Tara said, realizing she’d echoed her mother’s advice about having a child. “First, tell the truth, then deal with the consequences.” Her heart went out to him, but he’d done a terrible thing. “My father would never have closed the factory. The company and the people who worked for him meant too much to him. He sacrificed all his earnings and investments to keep it going until the profits from the new battery came in. You should have asked about the rumor, not taken it as truth.”
Matt hung his head. He’d been scared. People did stupid things when they were scared. She’d seen it over and over in her work. “Can I call my wife, tell her where I am? She’ll have to go to the doctor alone.”
Dylan and Tara stepped away to give him privacy while he broke the bad news to his poor wife. “I’ll drive him in, Tara. You can get going.”
“This shouldn’t have happened,” she said. “It wouldn’t have if Wharton management had kept its employees informed. That’s what I would have told Faye if I’d really listened and tried to help. I might have prevented the accident after all.” Guilt washed through her and she bit her lip.
“One piece of advice can’t turn a company around, Tara.”
“I know that. I still regret not doing my part.”
“Now we have to go forward, make things right where we can.”
She nodded, grateful for Dylan’s steady presence, his reasonable words. “Matt’s confession will bring an investigator out here for sure. We can email the tape we just got. If we’re lucky, the investigators will figure out who hit the car. They do in-person interviews. Someone needs to pin Fallon down.”
“We may never know what happened, Tara. You have to be prepared for that.”
“Maybe when Faye wakes up, she’ll tell us.” The possibility seemed far away and Tara’s chest felt hollow and hopeless for a moment. She forced herself to stick with what she could do, not what she hoped for.
“I hate to say this, but my father was right,” Dylan said. “We were being sabotaged by Wharton testers.”
“And I owe him an apology for what I accused him of.” Dylan had been right. She had been too eager to blame his father. “Wharton wronged your company. We need to set up a meeting to discuss how to correct that.”
“That will be good. I think we just saved Ryland Engineering. If you hadn’t pushed for the truth, we would likely have lost the Wharton contract. I owe you for that, Tara. I’ll always be grateful.”
“We made a good team,” she said, trying to smile. “Mostly. Except when I was naming suspects right and left.”
“That’s true.” He smiled, then got serious. “But you made me see one thing. I have worked long enough with my father. I need to get on with what I want. Since it looks like the company will survive, I can leave when I planned.”
“I said some harsh things. I exaggerated. I know that.”
“There was enough truth in what you to get me thinking and a conversation I had with Victor