“And Petra! It’s good to see you. You look lovely.”
“Hi, Mr. Vermeyer. Thanks,” Petra said, taking his offered hand. He shook hers with gentlemanly care. Though she was a fully grown woman, this man had been her father’s attorney since she was a child, so he’d probably be ‘Mr. Vermeyer’ forever.
“Well, please, sit,” Mr. Vermeyer said, indicating the seating area in the far corner of the room, rather than the leather armchairs before his impressive desk. When her mother had been alive, and her father had been whole, they’d had a vibrant social life, of which Mr. Vermeyer and his wife had been a part. Apparently clients who were also friends got to sit on a sofa and pretend their meeting was a social call.
Petra and her father sat on a crimson, tufted-leather sofa. Mr. Vermeyer took the matching club chair positioned at a right angle to the sofa.
“So, let’s skip the small talk today, yes?” he asked. “I know you’re not doing very well, and there’s not much point just now talking about how I’m doing—which is fine, by the way, just to put the period on that. We’re doing well at my house.”
“I’m glad,” Dad said. “That’s good.” He let loose a quiet, rueful chuckle. “Not so much at my house.”
“Yes.” Mr. Vermeyer sighed. “It’s unfortunate that you gave them a breathalyzer at the scene and gave them urine at the station. All without a warrant. We talked about that with your first charge, Alec.”
“I know. I wasn’t ... I’m not sure what I was thinking. Not much, to be honest.”
“I expect not.” He leaned to the side and picked up a file folder from the table that formed the angle between the sofa and his chair. “You blew 2.3 at the scene. Urine an hour later showed just shy of 2.0.”
Dad was nodding, but Petra was shocked. She hadn’t heard the number before now. “2.3? That’s almost three times the limit!”
“It is.” Mr. Vermeyer sighed again. “We’ve been friends a long time, Alec, so I’m going to talk to you as a friend and deliver a hard truth. This isn’t going to go like the first time. For a first offense, even with the breathalyzer, it wasn’t terribly difficult to keep you free. Suspended sentence, probation, fine, short-term suspension of license, AA—all that’s pretty typical for a first offense. But a second within ten years of the first is an automatic felony, with a mandatory sentence of no less than one year. Pretty much the only way to avoid doing time is to fight the charge and win.” He waved the folder in his hand. “You made that extremely difficult, Alec. Within two years of your first. Only months since your probation ended. And you gave them two tests, dated and timed.”
Her father said nothing. He simply stared at his hands, folded on his lap. Petra watched him for a few seconds, waiting, but when he remained inert, she turned to the lawyer. “You’re saying he’s going to jail.”
Mr. Vermeyer set the folder on the table before them and turned his attention to her. “I’m saying it’s likely. There’s a fight to make, but I’ll be fighting it on procedure, looking for flaws in the way they pulled him over, arrested him, processed him. Looking for problems with their testing equipment. Our only real option here is to challenge the way they got those test results. Meanwhile, the ADA will be looking for witnesses to corroborate his drunkenness. They’ll investigate his probationary history, they’ll rummage through the trash—anything they can do to back up the tests.” He turned again to her father. “Are you still regularly attending meetings, Alec?”
Still staring at his hands, Dad continued to say nothing.
“Can they find that out?” Petra asked. “AA is anonymous. It’s the second A in the name.”
Yet another sigh from the lawyer as he focused on her again. “I assume, then, that he hasn’t been keeping up with that?”
She shook her head.
“Since his probationary period ended, he doesn’t have to sign in, but they have ways of suggesting he isn’t attending—like simply following him.”
Jesus. Her father was going to jail. Petra didn’t think he could survive that, not even for one year. She didn’t thinkshecould survive knowing he was there.
“We have to fight it. Whatever we have to do.”
“No.”
Petra turned to her father, who’d finally found his words. One of them, at least.
“Daddy ...”
“No, Petey. I’m not going to fight it. Iwasthat drunk. Ididdrive like that, and it wasn’t my second offense, not really. Just the second time I got caught. There have been plenty of times I didn’t get caught. I could have killed someone. I could have done to another family what that boy did to ours.”
She thought of that a lot, actually—the twisted, painful irony of how her mother’s death at the hands of a drunk driver had pushed her father back into alcoholism and all the horrors that entailed. Never had she said it to him, though. She was afraid to add guilt to his mountain of pain.
He’d never said it to her, either, until this moment.
While years of pain crashed around inside Petra like waves against rocks, her father turned to his lawyer. “If I plead guilty, what can you do in a plea bargain?”
Mr. Vermeyer was nodding. “That’s my recommendation. I’ll be honest, I’ve not heard from the ADA about a deal, which suggests they intend to prosecute fully—and with the evidence you handed over, I understand why. So we’ll be starting in the hole when I go to them first. I think it’s unlikely we can get you a deal with no time at all.”
Petra felt sick. Her father blew out a long, shaky breath.
“Understood,” he said.