September 11 Attacks and Roger Bolduc’s Disappearance from the World Trade Center

The September 11 attacks and Roger Bolduc’s disappearance from the World Trade Center join a public catastrophe to a private mystery: Roger vanishes in the destruction, while the D’Anjou family cameo also disappears, and the search for the stone exposes a trail of betrayal that reaches back to its earlier history. The novel confirms Roger’s death through DNA-identified bone fragments, but the cameo remains unaccounted for, sustaining a second, entangled story of loss and pursuit.

The Disappearance and Its Uncertainty

Roger’s fate is not immediately established. After the attacks, his family has no body and no reliable account of what happened to him; he is treated as lost somewhere beyond reach. The uncertainty is especially charged for Isabelle D’Anjou, his wife, who had been implicated in the family’s covert dealings around the cameo. The disappearance leaves her with both grief and guilt, while the missing object gives the family another reason to hope that the story is not finished.

Nine months after the attacks, recovery work at Ground Zero is still in its early stages, amid an enormous field of debris. The slow, incomplete search matters to the plot: no trace of the cameo has yet been reported, and its absence cannot be taken as proof that it was destroyed. Roger’s disappearance and the stone’s disappearance therefore remain parallel uncertainties, although they are not resolved in the same way.

Roger’s Death Confirmed

In June 2002, Isabelle receives a letter from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York. It confirms that fragments of her husband’s bones were recovered from the World Trade Center ruins and that DNA testing has identified them as Roger’s. The news turns disappearance into confirmed death. Isabelle has to reread the English letter to take in its findings; the document says nothing about the cameo, suggesting that it has not been found.

The confirmation does not provide Isabelle with a fuller account of Roger’s final hours. Instead, it closes one question while leaving another open. Her family had already begun to regard Roger as permanently gone, but it had continued to hope for the cameo. That difference shapes the aftermath: Roger can no longer be recovered, whereas the object may still emerge from the unfinished work at Ground Zero.

The Cameo and the Trail of Betrayal

The attacks are also the culmination of a sequence Loïc reconstructs from Régis D’Anjou’s notes and his own deductions. He concludes that Charles de C... had set out to recover the missing cameo after Régis visited France, and that the affair proceeded toward September 11 through Roger Bolduc’s betrayal. Régis, Loïc realizes, never learned Charles’s name. The gap in Régis’s knowledge helps explain how the chain could continue unseen, and Loïc wonders whether Charles wanted to eliminate him because he had already learned too much.

The object’s ownership becomes a practical problem for investigators after a witness reports that a cameo was found at Ground Zero. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovers two separate claims, supported by similar photographs, for a stone matching the description: one from France and one from Canada. More troublingly, both claims are made in the names of people considered potential September 11 victims who do not appear on the dead or missing lists. The competing claims turn the cameo into evidence of a concealed history, but do not establish who owns the recovered stone.

Georges D’Anjou’s claim reaches New York two days after Charles de C...’s. Georges has also sent a genetic profile for Roger, whom he believes may have died in the attacks. Authorities verify that both claimants are credible: Georges is a Quebec Superior Court judge, and Charles is a successful winemaker in southwestern France. They prepare to tell them that a cameo has been found in the debris and stolen, but the official responsible for operations at Ground Zero insists that they wait until the object is recovered. The delay leaves the two claims in suspense and makes the theft part of the continuing investigation, rather than a settled discovery.

Foreshadowing and Consequences

Loïc’s nightmare at the time of the attacks later leads him to suspect an intrinsic connection between the family cameo and satanic energies. In his interpretation, evil is embedded in the onyx and can radiate outward, following or intensifying acts of destruction. This is presented as Loïc’s developing understanding, not as a publicly verified explanation of the attacks. The disaster gives his supernatural theory a terrifying scale, while the missing stone prevents him from separating its imagined influence from the human conspiracy he has reconstructed.

For Isabelle, the aftermath is intimate and continuing. Having struggled to overcome drug addiction, she remains depressed, takes long solitary walks on the Plains of Abraham, and spends much of the day withdrawn in her room. Her parents bring her to their home on Grande-Allée after an overdose earlier in the year, hoping to watch over her. Georges hesitates to confront her about her complicity, partly because of her fragility and partly because he hopes an admission might relieve her guilt. The confirmed death of Roger thus settles neither the family’s emotional damage nor the mystery of the cameo. The attacks leave a fixed loss, an unresolved object, and a plot whose concealed connections are still being pieced together.