Roger Bolduc’s disappearance becomes an unresolved knot joining the September 11 attacks to the suspected loss of the D’Anjou family cameo. He was traced from Québec to Montréal and onward toward New York, but no one could establish whether he had reached the World Trade Center complex on the morning of the attacks. The absence of a confirmed death left room for both grief and accusation: to some relatives, Roger was a possible victim; to others, he had vanished with the family jewel and used the catastrophe as cover.

The Journey Before the Attacks

In Québec in the autumn of 2001, the immediate fact of Roger’s absence was already unsettling. He was no longer seen at the golf course, the Garrison Club, or his usual restaurant on rue Saint-Jean. His car remained parked in Sillery, while a witness had seen him carrying a briefcase at Québec’s intermodal station on the afternoon of September 10. He boarded an express coach bound for Montréal. Because he left the day before the attacks, the journey made it possible that he had been in New York the following morning, but it did not establish that he had been there.

Further information sharpened the route without explaining it. Georges D’Anjou told Loïc that Roger had been heading to Toronto before changing direction in Montréal and taking the overnight coach to New York City. The reason for this change was unknown. Nor could the family say whether Roger had gone to the World Trade Center complex. The investigation was continuing, and his whereabouts remained unverified.

The uncertainty made every detail of the journey carry more weight than it could resolve. A parked car and a briefcase at a station could establish movement, not destination or purpose. Roger’s trip was clandestine enough to invite suspicion, but the narrative keeps the crucial question open: he may have been in the towers, yet no evidence presented at this point confirms it.

Suspicion Within the Family

When Georges reported the New York connection, he said Isabelle was in no condition to speak after learning that her husband had been there on the day of the attacks. At a family gathering, Georges recounted that he had recently changed his bank safe-deposit box and transferred the cameo, believing the substitution had happened afterward. The relatives’ attention turned to Isabelle, whose lowered eyes and rigid, pale expression were read against the growing suspicion surrounding Roger. His secret journey and disappearance made him appear implicated in the cameo’s loss, though neither fact proved that he had taken it.

Georges said that he had already spoken at length with Isabelle. She had told him what she knew, he explained, but Roger had kept many of his business dealings and schemes from her as well as from the rest of the family. Her ignorance did not quiet the accusations. Alain, Isabelle’s older brother, openly denounced the Bolduc family, and the gathering treated Roger less as a missing relative than as a presumed culprit. The distinction between evidence and judgment was already beginning to collapse.

The family’s unspoken questions converged on the same uncertainties: what Roger had gone to New York to do, whether he had taken the cameo, and whether he was dead. If he had died in the attacks, the family might never learn what happened to the jewel; if he had survived, his disappearance could instead suggest flight. The account leaves both possibilities unsettled rather than granting the family’s suspicions the status of fact.

Rumor and Public Disclosure

In Québec, rumors multiplied around Roger’s absence. One story alleged that he had a lover in Montréal, after someone claimed to have seen him with a glamorous woman at a restaurant on rue Saint-Denis. The report spread through the city’s wealthier districts, while the coach journey and the timing of his departure gave the gossip a more consequential frame: he might have reached New York before September 11. These reports did not establish either an affair or his presence at the World Trade Center, but they made the unknowns harder for Isabelle to escape.

Isabelle was increasingly avoided and stigmatized in Québec. Roger’s brothers and sisters, hearing stories ranging from the salacious to the far-fetched, repeatedly called to demand an explanation; eventually, she cut off contact. The rumors also threatened to spill beyond the family. Georges feared that a local tabloid in the Bas-Saint-Laurent, where many of the Bolducs lived, might expose the story. He chose instead to arrange a controlled account in Le Soleil, stating that Roger had been in New York on the day of the attacks, was not on the list of victims, and could not yet be presumed dead. The article said that the family had asked the police to investigate.

That limited disclosure did not settle the matter. Inside the D’Anjou family, Roger’s guilt was increasingly treated as certain: relatives imagined that he had sold the cameo to an anonymous collector and used the attacks to disappear, perhaps to a tax haven or a distant Pacific island. The theory had no confirmation, but the passage of time without proof that Roger had died in the towers made it more persuasive to those already inclined to distrust him. The dispute widened the old antagonism between the D’Anjou and Bolduc families, while Isabelle was caught between her husband’s relatives and her own.

The Cameo Search and the Unresolved Record

A different possibility kept the search tied to the destruction in New York. If Roger had met the mysterious Patrice Desbois at or near the World Trade Center complex, the cameo might have been among the ruins. Finding a small stone in the immense debris was likened to searching for a needle in a haystack, but Georges acted on the possibility. On Isabelle’s behalf, he sent New York authorities photographs and detailed descriptions of the cameo, including information about its historical and family value. This material supplemented the dossier already sent concerning Roger, which included his genetic fingerprints.

Georges simultaneously tried to contain the story. As head of the family, he feared that publicity about Roger’s disappearance would expose the history of the cameo and attract journalists to its mysteries. He sought to keep the affair from spreading further, even as the search required information about the jewel to be shared with authorities. His secrecy and his appeal for help thus pulled in opposite directions: the family needed the cameo recognized if it was to be found, but Georges feared what public attention might uncover.

The disappearance remains consequential precisely because it is not resolved into a confirmed death or a proven escape. Roger’s unexplained route, the missing cameo, and the lack of evidence placing him in the towers sustain rival readings of the same absence. For the family, uncertainty becomes an engine of accusation; for the search, it remains a practical obstacle. The episode leaves Roger’s fate unknown and the cameo’s location unanswered.