Page smiled thinking of it. He was such a good guy, and he'd been so decent to her tonight. It was still difficult to assimilate what had happened. “I don't know what I'm going to say to Brad. He and Allie are so close …it'll kill him.”
“It's a nightmare for everyone …and the poor kid who was driving …imagine what his parents must be feeling.”
They had an opportunity to see it firsthand, when the Chapmans arrived at Marin General at six o'clock in the morning. They were a nice-looking couple in their late fifties. She had well-groomed white hair, and Mr. Chapman looked like a banker. Page saw them arrive at the front desk, looking exhausted and worn. They had driven all the way from Carmel the moment they had been called, unable to believe what had happened. Phillip was their only child, they had had him late, and had never been able to have any others. He was the light of their life, which was why they hadn't wanted him to go East to college. They couldn't bear the idea of his being so far away, and now he couldn't be farther. He was gone from their life forever.
Mrs. Chapman stood with her head bowed, crying softly as they listened to the doctor, her husband had an arm around her and cried openly as he told them that Phillip had been killed instantly from a head injury and a broken neck that had severed both his spinal cord and his brain stem. There had been no hope of his surviving from the moment of impact.
The doctor told them too that there had been a small amount of alcohol in his blood, not enough to make him legally drunk, but maybe enough for a boy his age to be slightly affected. He did not say that the accident was due to him, it still remained unclear who had hit whom, or why. But the implication was there, and the Chapmans looked horrified when they heard it. The doctor in the examining room told them that the other driver had been Senator Hutchinson's wife, and that she was devastated over it, not that that changed anything for the Chapmans. Phillip was dead, no matter who the other driver had been. Mrs. Chapman's grief turned suddenly to anger as she listened to him and the implication that Phillip might have been drinking. She asked if the other driver had been checked too, and was told that she hadn't. The patrolmen at the scene had been certain she was sober. There had been no suspicion about her at all. And as he listened, Tom Chapman grew visibly angry. He looked outraged by what they'd just told them. He was a well-known attorney, and the idea that Phillip had been tested, and even subtly slurred, while the Senator's wife was assumed without reproach seemed like an appalling injustice, and one that he wasn't going to stand for.
“What are you telling me? That because my son was seventeen, half a glass of wine, or roughly its equivalent, makes him presumed guilty of this accident? But a grown woman who may well have drunk a great deal more than he, and possibly been severely affected by it, is above the law because she's married to a politician?” Tom Chapman was shaking with grief and rage as he spoke to the young doctor who had just told him that Laura Hutchinson had not been checked for alcohol, only because the patrolmen on the scene “assumed” she was sober.