Roger Bolduc's Disappearance After Traveling to New York

Roger Bolduc’s disappearance after traveling to New York becomes a convergence of private uncertainty, public suspicion, and a covert effort to recover a family heirloom. The evidence places him on a route from Québec City, through Montréal, to New York on September 11, 2001, and links him to a meeting at an office on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center complex. It never establishes that he reached the building. His fate remains unknown as the attack turns a missing-person inquiry into a question entangled with mass death and a vanished cameo.

Background and the Change of Route

By autumn 2001, Roger’s absence was conspicuous. He was no longer seen at his usual golf course, at the Garrison Club, or at the restaurant he regularly visited on rue Saint-Jean. The first account Isabelle D’Anjou gave Loïc came by telephone: around four in the afternoon, she told him Roger was away on a trip to Toronto and that she could no longer reach him on his mobile phone. Her voice sounded strained and anxious despite her initial pleasure at hearing from Loïc. The destination she named would soon be overtaken by a more alarming account.

Georges D’Anjou later told Loïc that Isabelle had learned Roger was in New York on the day of the attacks. According to Georges, Roger had been heading toward Toronto but changed course in Montréal and boarded the overnight bus to New York. No reason for the diversion was known, and the family could not establish whether Roger had been at the World Trade Center complex that morning. The police inquiry was still under way. The route was clear enough to alarm the family, but not to answer the decisive question of where Roger had gone after arriving in New York.

The marriage itself crossed a longstanding family divide. Isabelle had pursued a relationship with Roger, the younger son of Romuald Bolduc, despite the Bolducs’ enmity with the D’Anjous in Touladi. She had eventually won her father’s consent to the match after a protracted campaign. That history made Roger’s disappearance more than a private absence: it placed Isabelle between families already primed to distrust one another, with both sides demanding to know what had happened.

A Meeting at the World Trade Center

The investigation found a specific, troubling lead in Roger’s computer. With police assistance, the family managed to open it and found an appointment in New York on September 11 with a person named Patrice Desbois. The number listed under Desbois’s name began with France’s country code, which led Georges to suggest that Desbois was probably French. A call to that number reached an automated message saying the service was no longer available. The appointment entry gave a date and city, but no meeting place.

Further police inquiries connected Desbois, apparently, to Berkshire Funds, either as a contract employee or as a European associate. He sometimes rented an office there for business in New York. The company’s offices were in the World Trade Center complex, on the 99th floor of the North Tower—the tower struck by the first plane. The connection made Roger’s possible presence at the site much harder to treat as rumor alone. Yet it remained circumstantial: the computer did not name the office as the rendezvous point, and the evidence did not establish that Roger arrived for the appointment.

The family’s questions therefore narrowed without being resolved. There was a named contact, a defunct telephone number, and an office at the point of impact, but no confirmed meeting and no confirmed location for Roger. Georges pressed the police to investigate and shared the findings with relatives; he also insisted that the matter remain strictly confidential. Loïc agreed not to discuss it. Secrecy protected the family from immediate exposure, but it could not stop speculation from spreading.

Rumor and the Pressure on Isabelle

As the account circulated around Québec City and its surroundings, rumor supplied the certainty that the investigation lacked. One story claimed Roger was having an affair in Montréal, after someone said they had seen him with a glamorous woman in a restaurant on rue Saint-Denis. Other details acquired a different weight once the attacks were known: Roger’s car had remained parked in Sillery, but he had been seen with a briefcase at Québec City’s intermodal station on the afternoon of September 10, boarding the express bus to Montréal. Because he left the day before the attacks, people could readily imagine that he had reached New York in time to be caught up in them.

The rumors landed most heavily on Isabelle. In Québec City people looked at her askance and avoided her; she felt increasingly excluded and stigmatized. Roger’s siblings and other relatives in the Bolduc family also pressed her for answers, calling repeatedly with stories that ranged from salacious to outlandish. Unable to endure the harassment, she eventually cut off contact. Her isolation grew not because the facts had become clearer, but because the public and the families around her treated conjecture as an explanation.

Georges D’Anjou feared that the rumors would become newspaper reports and spill beyond Québec. Though he knew media owners and executives in the region, he was less able to control what a local tabloid in the Bas-Saint-Laurent might publish. He considered getting ahead of the story by arranging a controlled article in Le Soleil that would reveal just enough to satisfy public curiosity. The proposed disclosure was a response to the threat of uncontrolled publicity, not proof that Roger’s whereabouts had been established. In the family’s effort to manage the story, information itself became another contested resource.

The Hidden Purpose of the New York Appointment

A parallel account reveals that Roger’s New York meeting had been arranged as part of a plan Charles de C... had spent years pursuing. On September 11, Charles expected the meeting to produce the recovery of a cameo he considered invaluable to his family. Ten minutes before checking his watch at a quarter to three, he had received a call from his friend Pierre de Mirbeau in Paris. Mirbeau reported that their agent, Franck Aubry, and Aubry’s assistant were waiting for Bolduc in a World Trade Center office. The location had been chosen deliberately to impress Roger.

Charles had put money and five years of scheming into the attempt to regain the cameo, and the prospect of success had seemed close. His concern in the first moments of the crisis was the jewel, ahead of the lives of Aubry, the assistant, and Roger. As reports from the United States grew more catastrophic, however, the danger widened beyond the planned transaction: another plane had struck the Capitol, other aircraft had been hijacked, Congress had been evacuated, and the country was on a war footing. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, Charles understood that the cameo he had pursued for years might be lost beneath the rubble. His repeated calls to Mirbeau could not change what had happened.

The shift between the family’s search and Charles’s private account changes the meaning of the appointment without resolving Roger’s fate. What looked to the D’Anjous like a possible business meeting—or a mystery without an evident motive—was also the endpoint of a carefully prepared attempt to recover a cameo. The coincidence of that plan with the attack turns an unexplained journey into a double disappearance: Roger cannot be located, and the object sought through him is presumed lost in the collapse. The book leaves the central human question open; the evidence connects Roger to the rendezvous, but does not confirm that he was at the World Trade Center complex.