The Stranger(47)

“But here’s the problem,” Adam said. “I don’t know what happened here, okay? If your mom contacted you and told you not to tell me where she is, well, I would listen to her on that. But I don’t think she did. I don’t think she’d put you or Ryan in that position.”

“Mom didn’t,” Thomas said, still staring at the band on his arm.

“Okay.”

“But she did make me promise never to sign into this.”

“Sign into what?”

“This app.”

“Thomas?”

The boy looked up.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“See, we made a deal. Mom and me.”

“What kind of deal?”

“She would only use the app in emergencies, not to spy on me. But I was never allowed to use it.”

“What do you mean, emergencies?”

“Like if I’d gone missing or she really couldn’t reach me.”

Adam felt himself spinning again. He stopped and tried to center himself. “Maybe you should explain about this app.”

“It’s called a phone locator, and it’s supposed to help you find your phone, you know, in case you lose it or someone steals it.”

“Okay.”

“So it shows you where your phone is on this map. All phones come with an app like this, I think, but this is an upgrade. So see, if something happened to us, or Mom couldn’t find me or Ryan, she could look us up on the app and know exactly where we were.”

“From the phone?”

“Right.”

Adam reached out his hand. “Let me see.”

Thomas hesitated. “But that’s the thing. I wasn’t supposed to use it.”

“But you did, right?”

He lowered his head and nodded.

“You signed in and you saw where your mother is?”

Another nod.

Adam put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’m not mad,” he said. “But could you let me see the app?”

Thomas took out his phone. His fingers danced across the screen. When he was done, he handed the phone to his father. Adam looked at it. There was a map showing Cedarfield. Three blinking dots were coming from the same place. One dot was blue, another green, another red.

“So these dots . . . ,” Adam began.

“That’s us.”

“Us?”

“Right. You, me, and Ryan.”

The pulse in Adam’s head started to thrum. When he spoke, his voice sounded far away. “Me?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a dot representing me?”

“Yeah. You’re the green one.”

His mouth went dry. “So, in other words, if your mom wanted, she could track . . .” He stopped. There was no need to finish the thought. “How long has this app been on our phones?”

“I don’t know. Three, four years maybe.”

Adam just sat there as the realization rolled over him. Three or four years. For three or four years, Corinne had that ability to sign into some app and see exactly where her children and, more important, her husband were at any given moment.

“Dad?”

He had prided himself on his naïveté when it came to this technological mastery that had enslaved the masses, that forced us to ignore one another and obey its insatiable demand for attention. Adam’s phone had, to his knowledge, no unnecessary apps. No games, no Twitter, no Facebook, no shopping, no scores, no weather reports, none of that. He had the apps the phone came with—e-mail, texts, phone, stuff like that. He had Ryan put on a GPS that mapped out the best driving routes, taking into account the traffic.

But that was it.

“So why can’t I see Mom on this thing?” Adam asked.

“You need to zoom out.”

“How?”

Thomas took back the phone, placed two fingers on the screen, pinched them. He handed the phone back to his father. Adam could now see the entire state of New Jersey and to the west, Pennsylvania. An orange dot was on the left part of the screen. Adam tapped on it and the phone zoomed in again.

Pittsburgh?

Adam had made the drive to Pittsburgh once to bail a client out of jail. The ride had taken him more than six hours.

“Why isn’t the dot blinking?” Adam asked.

“Because it’s not active.”

“What do you mean?”

Thomas bit back the sigh he always sounded when he had to explain technology to his father. “When I checked the app a few hours ago, she was still moving. But then, about an hour ago, well, that’s where Mom was.”

“So she stopped here?”

“I don’t think so. See, if you click here . . .” He reached over and touched the screen. An image of a mobile phone with the word CORINNE’S came up. “It puts the battery power left up here on the right. See? So when I checked it then, her phone only had about four percent left. It’s out now, so the dot stopped blinking.”