The September 11 attacks are both a mass catastrophe and the hinge on which several of the novel’s mysteries turn. The collapse of the World Trade Center leaves Roger Bolduc missing, brings the family cameo into the story of Ground Zero, and intensifies Loïc’s sense that private violence and public destruction are linked. Yet the aftermath offers neither immediate certainty about Roger nor a stable account of the stone: identification, competing claims, and the cameo’s eventual return unfold over years, while its supposed supernatural influence remains a belief rather than a proven cause.

The catastrophe and its private aftermath

The attacks enter the novel through their lasting effects on those left behind. Roger Bolduc, who had disappeared in New York, was presumed to have been caught in the destruction of the World Trade Center. For his wife, Isabelle D’Anjou, and the D’Anjou family, the disappearance first meant an absence without confirmation. Roger seemed gone beyond reach, while the question of what had happened to him remained entangled with the family’s separate hope that its missing cameo might still be recovered.

In June 2002, a letter from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York gave Isabelle a specific, devastating answer. Fragments of her husband’s bones had been found in the wreckage, and DNA analysis confirmed their identity. She had to read the English letter more than once before she could take in what it said. The confirmation turned disappearance into death, but it did not resolve the other mystery: the letter made no mention of the cameo, and there was apparently no trace of it in the remains identified as Roger’s.

Isabelle’s grief was inseparable from guilt. She had been complicit in an undisclosed matter involving Roger and the cameo, and she remained depressed despite having partly overcome her drug addiction. After an overdose earlier that year, her parents brought her to their home on Grande-Allée so they could watch over her. She walked alone on the Plains of Abraham, then spent much of the day shut in her room with her laptop. Her father, Georges D’Anjou, thought that coaxing a confession from her might lift the burden, but her fragility and withdrawal left him unable to find the right moment. The attacks had not only taken Roger; the uncertain circumstances surrounding his disappearance continued to shape the family’s attempts to live with the loss.

Ground Zero and the competing claims

The rubble at Ground Zero also became the setting for a dispute over the cameo. Nine months after the attacks, clearance and excavation were still in their early stages. The novel emphasizes this drawn-out search: Roger’s death could be confirmed through remains and DNA, while the fate of the object remained open as debris was still being examined.

The investigation widened when Ron Gilbert, a friend of the murdered firefighter Jim Browning, gave authorities an account of the jewel found at Ground Zero. The FBI discovered two claims, from different sources, accompanied by similar photographs of a cameo matching Gilbert’s description. One claim came from France and the other from Canada; each was made in the name of someone thought to be a potential victim of the attacks, although neither claimant appeared on the list of dead or missing. The duplication made ownership uncertain at precisely the moment the object’s discovery seemed capable of answering the family’s questions.

In September, Georges D’Anjou’s claim arrived in New York two days after Charles de Castelmont’s. Georges had also sent Roger’s genetic profile several days earlier, believing his son-in-law had died in the World Trade Center attacks. After checking the claimants’ identities, American authorities established that Georges was a prominent Quebec Superior Court judge and that Charles was a prosperous wine producer in southwestern France. The claims appeared credible, but investigators feared that announcing the discovery before recovering the jewel could compromise the search. The cameo had been stolen, and the FBI was already trying to locate the thief.

The pursuit also had a broader investigative purpose. Authorities alerted secondhand and antique shops across the United States, anticipating that Tim Jones might try to sell the stone. The FBI had earlier questioned Ramondo Cardoso about recent gemstone purchases; while one agent spoke with him, another secretly placed a listening device behind the shelves of his shop. Cardoso did not know that Gilbert’s account of Browning’s murder had also brought the Ground Zero jewel into the investigation. The search for an object among the wreckage thus extended into surveillance of the markets where a stolen jewel might resurface.

The cameo’s uncertain return

The attacks do not yield a clean resolution even when the cameo reappears. Loïc had grown less interested in its fate after meeting Laurence and becoming part of an inseparable couple. The unexpected Cuban episode drew him back into the matter, only to leave him feeling that some elusive force had led him back to the mystery without giving him an answer.

Then Isabelle called to say that the cameo had been found in New York and delivered to her in Quebec. It appeared intact, having survived the explosions, fire, and collapse of the towers. Loïc could not reconcile that report with what he thought he knew. He wondered whether there were two stones, one genuine and one counterfeit, or whether American police had recovered the cameo that had passed through Cuba. The object’s apparent survival did not settle its identity or route; it multiplied the possibilities.

Later, Charles de Castelmont’s own reasoning exposes how little the discovery established. He asked whose remains had actually been near the seemingly intact jewel: those of Franck Aubry, also known as Desbois, or those of Roger Bolduc. He had heard that Aubry’s remains were found, but could not tell whether Roger’s had been. If the cameo had been sent to Charles rather than to the D’Anjous, he reasoned, perhaps Roger’s remains had not been discovered and the family had not yet informed New York that the jewel was missing. These were conjectures, not confirmed findings. The cameo’s return could not establish where it had lain, who had possessed it, or how Roger and Aubry might have been connected to it.

The family scandal resurfaces years later when a journalist links the D’Anjou controversy over Georges and Lucille to Roger’s disappearance in New York. The connection enlarges public suspicion and gives the story a reach beyond the facts that can be established. In the novel, the attacks continue to reverberate not only through private mourning and the search for the jewel, but through later attempts to interpret the family’s actions and silences.

A catastrophe interpreted as a curse

For Loïc, the attacks become a turning point in how he understands evil. After September 11, he sees a possible intrinsic connection between the family cameo and satanic energies: he imagines an evil spirit embedded in the particles of the onyx, sending out harmful waves capable of accompanying or amplifying destruction. The account presents this as Loïc’s interpretation, not as an independently verified explanation of the attacks. His sense of a link between the stone and world events grows from an earlier nightmare associated with September 11 and from his longstanding belief that the cameo has marked his family.

The catastrophe also sharpens his recognition of violence within intimate life. He sees his own relationship with Brigitte as having turned toward violence, and understands the rage between them as a destructive mirroring that could consume love as well as anger. He places that experience alongside what he sees as the wider spread of violence, corruption, confused values, and inhumanity. The scale changes—from a couple’s private conflict to global catastrophe—but the novel’s recurring question is whether destructive forces move through both without being fully recognized.

At the end of the account, September 11 remains a rupture rather than a solved enigma. Roger’s remains are identified, but the jewel’s place among the debris and its route afterward remain uncertain. Loïc’s conviction that the cameo radiates malevolent influence gives the attacks a place in the family’s supernatural history, while the evidence also preserves the gaps and contradictions that prevent that conviction from becoming proof. The disaster binds a death, a missing object, and a continuing investigation together, but does not make them one explainable event.