Can You Keep a Secret? (28 page)

Cramer got up from his seat and drew his weapon.

‘Hands in the air,’ he said, though Colby’s hands – still holding the set of keys he’d used to open Summer’s door – were already raised.

‘Don’t move,’ Cramer said.

‘I’m not moving.’ Colby was wearing the weekend uniform of Wall Street bankers: chino shorts and a polo shirt.

‘Get on your knees.’ Cramer motioned with his gun.

Colby didn’t argue. He slowly got down onto one knee and then the other. The door to the apartment closed behind him.

Summer cried out, ‘You’re making a mistake.’

Colby looked over at her, and said, ‘It’s okay, Summer. It’s okay. Just give me a chance to explain.’

‘Yes, tell them,’ Summer cried.

‘Tell us what? Your house has burnt down, and your kid
is missing. All we want to know is where we can find your boy,’ Cramer said.

‘You don’t understand,’ Colby said.

‘Help me understand,’ said Cramer. ‘Actually, no, I don’t need to understand. Just tell me: where’s the boy?’

Colby took a deep breath. The news networks had by now been showing footage of what remained of his house for more than an hour. Summer’s own TV was showing it: the volume was still down, but Colby could see the images of the smouldering wreck and of course he could read the ticker:
Breaking News. Fire Destroys Luxury Larchmont Mansion. Five-Year-Old Boy Missing.

Colby breathed deeply through his nose. ‘I don’t have a son,’ he said.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Cramer. This business about Benjamin only ever being the adopted child was wearing thin. ‘The boy you adopted, then. Benjamin. Where is he?’

‘If you would just listen,’ said Colby. ‘There is no Benjamin. There is no boy we adopted. I don’t have a son. None of it is true.’

‘He’s telling the truth,’ cried Summer. ‘I was trying to tell you. There is no Benjamin. He doesn’t have a son. Please listen to him: Caitlin makes things up. She’s been going on about this for almost a year. It started as just a story on her website, but now it’s like she thinks it’s real. It isn’t real. There is no Benjamin.’

Cramer and Bassingsthwaite exchanged confused glances.

‘It’s true,’ said Colby, as quietly and firmly as he could. ‘There. Is. No. Benjamin. I don’t have a son. My wife, Caitlin, she … she invented a child that she could not have. She decorated a room in our house for him. She keeps a website in his name. She has a scrapbook, filled with pictures of him. But he’s not real.’

‘She can’t help it. She’s just not well,’ said Summer. More tears than ever were streaming down her face.

Cramer lowered his pistol, although only by an inch.

‘What are you telling me?’ he asked.

And so Colby tried again to explain. Benjamin wasn’t real. None of it was. He had talked to Caitlin about having children. They’d given it a good go, but nothing had happened. Colby had suggested IVF, but Caitlin wanted to look into adoption. Colby had gone along with it, thinking she’d get pregnant with a baby of their own eventually, but the deeper they got into the process, the more concerned he became by Caitlin’s erratic behaviour.

‘In the end, I just couldn’t do it,’ Colby said. ‘I just had a feeling, with Caitlin, that something wasn’t right. Her behaviour – I can’t explain it, just … she’s very strange. First it was pills. She’d been given Valium because apparently she had a phobia about flying. But then when she was told she’d have to go to Moscow to pick up a child, suddenly it was fine, she could get on a plane. I started to have doubts about whether she’d ever had a phobia. I wanted to talk to her therapist about it, but then I found out that she’d stopped seeing her. I confronted Caitlin about that. She told me the
therapist wasn’t working for her, she was actually working for somebody else. As in, like the CIA or something.’

Colby’s knees were aching but he didn’t dare ask to get up. Cramer was still holding the gun, and still looking like he didn’t believe a word of it. The best thing seemed to be to keep talking.

‘I could see what was happening: she was becoming paranoid,’ Colby said. ‘She’d say things like 9/11 had been set up by our government to frighten her. She’d find something wrong with the food on her plate. Everything had poisons in it: chemicals that could kill you. She started losing weight. A lot of weight. Then she wouldn’t leave the house. The house became an obsession. She’d do one room, then do it all over again.

‘I told her that I wouldn’t go any further down the adoption path until she went back to therapy. And then I started getting emails from people. The adoption attorney we were going to use, Laura – she got in touch, saying Caitlin was constantly online, writing about a child she’d adopted through her agency, and what was all that about?

‘I went to Caitlin’s site and saw what she’d written, about how she had actually adopted a son. I didn’t think it was a big deal at first. It was just a story. But then she started getting all these followers, and the more followers she got the more she kept adding to the story: how the boy she’d picked up out of the orphanage was disturbed, and how she was trying to save him. Of course it was all nonsense. But at some point, she started to believe it. And she built her
whole world around it. And I could see it was crazy, but she couldn’t.’

Cramer was still looking at Colby like he needed to be convinced. ‘I don’t get this,’ he said. ‘I saw your wife outside your house, bashing the windows, trying to get in to save her son. Your wife told us that
you
wanted to get rid of Benjamin.’

Colby shook his head.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘as soon as I found out the extent of what Caitlin was doing – the website she was keeping, the fact that she was actually going to meetings of other moms with adopted kids, the fact that she had installed all this nursery furniture in what I thought was our unused attic – I tried to put a stop to it.

‘I told her, “You have got to get help.” But, like I said, she stopped seeing her therapist. I couldn’t get her to go. She’d say, “No, no, no, all anyone wants to talk about is me. Nobody wants to talk about Benjamin.” In the end,
I
went to see her therapist. I explained what had been going on, and she basically said she thought Caitlin was deluded and needed serious psychiatric care.

‘I asked her what I should do and she said I probably needed to take her to some kind of residential facility. And obviously that’s exactly what I should have done. But she’s my wife. There was a time – it’s gone now – but there was a time when I really loved her. And I still wanted to help her.

‘I wanted to give her a chance to help herself. So, I gave her an ultimatum. I said, “We have to do something about Benjamin. Because, you know, he’s ruining our life.” Which
was actually true. I said, “We have to get rid of him. Or else I can’t live here anymore.” I was hoping she’d see sense. But of course she didn’t. She can’t.’

Cramer looked doubtful. ‘And how do you explain the fire?’

‘Look, I don’t know,’ said Colby, ‘all I know is, since I moved out, Caitlin has been trying to reach me, and I’ve been refusing to talk until she got rid of Benjamin. And now I guess she has. She’s burnt him to death. Look, can I at least stand up?’

Cramer glanced across at Bassingsthwaite, who shrugged.

‘Okay,’ said Cramer. ‘But slowly. And then you can sit there – opposite side from your girlfriend.’

It was a mad story. Maybe the maddest he’d ever heard. But should he believe it? He wasn’t sure.

‘Thank you,’ said Colby, getting to his feet. ‘You have to believe me – I don’t know anything about this fire. I was at the serviced apartment all night. The concierge at the apartment can vouch for me. You can’t get in or out of the building without using your key pass. Maybe that won’t count for much in your eyes, but Caitlin’s been leaving rambling messages on my cell phone, too. Last night she called to say that she’d finally seen sense. Benjamin had to go. She was ready to get rid of him. She was definitely going to do it. I was confused about what she meant. I was online, watching her website. I thought she might post something, maybe that she’d given him up, or had him taken away. But then nothing happened.’

‘We found her on the lawn,’ said Cramer. He’d lowered his weapon completely now. ‘She was banging on your front windows with a stick. She was trying to get back inside. She had my men risk their lives to go in and look for that child.’

‘Look, I’m sorry about that,’ Colby said. ‘But you have to understand, as far as she’s concerned, Benjamin is real. And now she needs him to be gone somehow. She needs to believe that he’s dead. She’ll probably post it. And then she’ll get a whole new lot of sympathy and support. And that’s what sustains her.’

‘Well, we can’t go along with a charade like that,’ said Cramer.

‘You have to,’ said Summer.

Cramer snorted. ‘Not on your life. Nothing on earth would convince me to do it. And what do we tell the news media?’

Colby nodded. ‘You do what you have to do. But I’m telling you now, if Caitlin decides that Benjamin died in that fire, nothing you say will convince her otherwise.’

‘Well, I hope you understand that I’m not taking your word for any of this,’ said Cramer. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re still the father of a missing child and I’m going to take some convincing that your story is true.’

Colby gave Summer a reassuring smile. ‘I understand.’

‘Well then, I hope you also understand that you need to come with us while we sort this out,’ Cramer said, gruffly. ‘And if one word of this turns out not to be true …’

Cramer marched Colby from Summer’s apartment into the hall and then downstairs into the waiting squad car. Colby being who he was – a Wall Street banker – it made the news. The
Post
gave the story a cheeky headline: ‘Real Life Bonfire of the Vanities!’ The first paragraph of the story said, ‘Real-life Master of the Universe, Lachlan J. Colbert, a funds trader with the boutique investment bank Carnegie and Associates, was taken for questioning after a real-life bonfire destroyed the home he shared with his wife …’ And so on.

Sometime later, the
Larchmont Post
, citing ‘sources close to the story’, published a fuller account of the fire that essentially matched Colby’s version of events, with the reporter marvelling at the lengths to which Caitlin had gone to create the boy she called Benjamin, and to research other people’s stories of adoption and make them her own.

The hotel in Russia was exactly as she described, and yet she’d never been to Russia, let alone to that hotel. There
really was a place called Sam’s Happy Camp and it did offer controversial therapy for ‘attachment disorders’, but as far as anyone can tell, Caitlin was never there, and Colby certainly wasn’t.

The reporter also tracked down Sandi Miller, in her home in the village of Ho-Ho-Kus. To his surprise, she turned out to be a real person; one of very few from Caitlin’s life who had actually met Caitlin.

‘I read the first post she ever wrote about picking up her son, Benjamin, from the orphanage and I just knew it was a fraud,’ Sandi said. ‘Nobody,
nobody
, has such an easy time with an older child taken from an orphanage. It’s just not that easy. Caitlin was writing it like it was the dream adoption – the one we all think we’re going to have. It read to me like what she wanted, not what she had. So, I got in touch and invited her to one of our meetings. And she turned up.

‘I knew it was Caitlin because of the accent,’ Sandi said. ‘She’d made it clear on her own website that she was Australian. Plus, she looked Australian: she had the long straw-coloured hair, and freckles across her nose. And I could tell that she was suffering. She was thin – so skinny that she was shivering, even in her coat – and she’d chewed all her nails down. She was having a real bad time.’

Sandi told the reporter that Caitlin sat at the back of the group in one of the chairs that Sandi’s husband carried in from the lawn to cope with the crowd. She sat listening and chewing her cuticles. Occasionally, when one of the
other mums told a particularly funny or frustrating story, she laughed, but she didn’t contribute.

‘I tried to engage her,’ Sandi said, ‘but she kept saying, “No, no, we’re fine. We’ve had the odd hiccup, but overall we’re fine.” Of course I didn’t believe her, but what can you do? It sometimes takes a few meetings before people will open up. And after that, she started writing with an entirely new tone, about all the problems she was having. I felt very sorry for her. I used to leave very positive comments, trying to keep her spirits up. I’d reach out and invite her to come for a cup of coffee. But I never physically saw her again.’

The attorney, Laura, told the reporter that she didn’t personally discover Caitlin’s website, but one of her gay American clients alerted her to it. ‘We were looking into his adoption and he said, “Oh, I hear about people who have problems.” I’m always upfront. There can be problems. Then he said he had been reading Caitlin’s blog. I sent a note, by email, through the contact form. I said, “Are you okay? Did you perhaps get a child from another agency and you’ve still linked this child to me?” Because Caitlin’s husband had by then pulled the pin on their plans. I don’t know why. All I know is, he came to one meeting about how to make an adoption book and we didn’t see him again. It’s not unusual. People see what’s involved, and it’s too much for them. But then suddenly there was Caitlin, with a child from the Russian orphanage that I use.’

Colby wasn’t personally interviewed for the article, but a ‘close friend’ (actually a representative from Carn
egie’s public-relations arm, sent in to handle the crisis) was quoted saying that he had been ‘in a constant state of dread that somebody would come to him at work and say, “What is this, buddy? You’ve adopted a kid from Russia? I didn’t know that!” He was concerned that Caitlin was using her own first name, and his last name, by which he was known.

‘So, every day was like a dread for him. Would somebody pull him up on this? He was hoping if people did see it that they would say, “Well, it can’t be our Colby. He doesn’t have any kids.”’

The consensus, among Colby’s friends, was that he’d been a saint in trying to manage Caitlin’s problems on his own, but that, ultimately, he should have got her some professional help before things went so badly wrong.

Things are much better now. Three months after the fire that destroyed the house on Larchmont Hill, Colby formally moved in with Summer, and when his divorce from Caitlin comes through, he intends to marry her and to start his family. His house is gone, but it was insured. And, to Colby’s credit, to this day, he bears the cost of Caitlin’s treatment in a discreet private residential hospital in Connecticut.

‘She’s doing fine,’ he says when friends ask. And that’s true enough. Caitlin’s doing fine. She receives good care in lovely surrounds. Her hair has been trimmed into a bob, and with her tan long gone there’s no trace of the sun-kissed girl from Magnetic Island. Twice a week she gets intensive
therapy from a specialist called Dr Ranjana, who is one of the best in her field.

‘Hello, Caitlin,’ Dr Ranjana said, at one of her most recent sessions. ‘I see you’ve brought a scrapbook with you?’

‘Yes,’ said Caitlin, happily. ‘Although, it’s not really mine, it’s Benjamin’s. I made it for him.’

‘I see. And is it something you want to share with me?’

Caitlin considered this request for a moment, shrugged, and placed the scrapbook on the low table. The book was covered with protective plastic, under which she had clearly written, ‘The Book of Benjamin’.

‘It looks very new,’ said Dr Ranjana.

‘It is new,’ said Caitlin, ‘because this isn’t the original. I had a different one, but it got burnt in the fire. I had to make a new one.’

‘I like this detail,’ said Dr Ranjana, pointing at the letters. ‘Do you mind if I open it?’

Caitlin shook her head. ‘No, please do.’

Dr Ranjana smiled and opened the front cover. The pages were warped, from where glue under the various pictures had dried. The first photograph of a small boy had clearly been cut from a Ralph Lauren catalogue. The boy was wearing a smart polo shirt and belted shorts, and his hair was neatly parted to one side. He had a bold all-American smile.

‘And who is this?’ asked Dr Ranjana.

‘That’s Benjamin.’

‘And who is Benjamin?’

‘He’s my son.’

‘Is he now?’

Caitlin nodded, yes.

‘And he’s adopted, isn’t he? Have I got that right?’

‘Yes. My husband – Colby – and I, we got him from an orphanage. He’d been abandoned.’

‘I see. And how long has he lived with you?’

‘More than a year now. And you know it hasn’t been easy.’

‘No?’

‘No. But he’s having a little break from us. He’s in one of those camps, for troubled kids.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ said Dr Ranjana.

‘I know. But I miss him.’

‘Well, I’m sure he misses you, too.’

‘I know he does,’ said Caitlin, nodding happily, ‘but he’ll be home soon.’