The United States is more than the distant country named as the Founder’s birthplace: it is the landscape in which the D’Anjou family’s hidden origins begin to emerge and the family cameo enters a history of violence, secrecy, and uncertain identity. From a suspected massacre near Carthage, Missouri, to the World Trade Center complex in New York City, American places turn a private family mystery into a story crossing generations and borders.

A Setting of Buried Origins

The United States first matters as the Founder’s country of origin, a fact guarded as carefully as the stone associated with him. In a family account recounted by Marthe, the Founder had told her that a valuable stone in his safe troubled him because it came from the United States, his native country. He had also disclosed that he was adopted, while refusing to reveal anything about his birth family or whether the stone was connected to his origins. His fear of the object had led him to sew it into his scapular and clothing, intending to be buried with it and to have the matter forgotten. The country thus appears first not as a destination for travel but as a concealed past that the family heirloom seems to carry with it.

That origin becomes more concrete through a damaged old manuscript found among Régis’s papers. It recounts the discovery in 1842, near Saint Louis, of a living infant in the arms of a young woman who had frozen to death beneath the snow. A silk purse containing a fine cameo was pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. The account gives the object a place in the Founder’s life from infancy, but it does not settle the woman’s identity or establish precisely how the child came to be there. Loïc reads the document as the missing link between the family’s ancestor and the cameo: the stone was not merely an inheritance that appeared later in the family’s history, but may have accompanied its founder from the beginning.

The papers also include a copy of the Founder’s baptismal record, discovered in his safe and identifying Florissant, near Saint Louis, in 1842. Régis pursued the record’s implications through Jesuit archives, first consulting material held at Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal and later following a lead to an archival collection at Saint Louis University. The manuscript and baptismal entry together locate the infant’s early history in the United States, while leaving the precise chain of events open to investigation.

Carthage and the Unresolved Journey

Loïc’s research connects the infant’s story to Carthage, Missouri, where a separate archival discovery opens onto a scene of violence. A report by a county sheriff, preserved among regional Library of Congress materials, describes what the sheriff and his men found hours after a massacre near Carthage on November 2, 1842. Several pages of the document were blackened and nearly illegible; Loïc cannot determine whether they had been damaged in a fire or deliberately destroyed. The report says that neighbors had raised the alarm after seeing a fire. Rangers first had to contain flames that had consumed the ranch buildings and threatened the nearby forest; they then found the charred bodies.

The report presents no clear reason for the killings. There were no apparent signs of a general robbery, although horses were missing and the livestock had scattered. Witnesses reportedly identified the departing band as Sioux. In its account, the episode belongs to a period of forced Indigenous removal beyond the Mississippi under the Indian Removal Act, a context the narrative invokes without resolving what happened at the ranch or who, if anyone, escaped. The damaged report gives Loïc a possible point of origin for the tragedy behind the infant’s survival, not a complete explanation of it.

Loïc reconstructs a possible route from Carthage to Florissant for the young woman carrying the baby. On that hypothesis, she crossed nearly five hundred kilometers northeast, through the Ozarks and along the Missouri, seeking refuge at a convent of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. The convent had a girls’ school and novitiate at Florissant, established under the impetus of Philippine Duchesne. Loïc calculates that the journey took twenty-six days and that the woman died less than a kilometer from the convent in a snowstorm. He allows that she may have received help or travelled some stretches by vehicle or on horseback or mule. These are inferences from the surviving records, not a route documented in full; the gap between evidence and reconstruction is part of the mystery.

The Founder’s American Record

A photograph preserves another fragment of the Founder’s life in the United States. Loïc finds the old image among documents about the cameo and is fascinated by its nearly century-and-a-half-old light. It shows the Founder as a young man in a Union Army uniform, standing with two regimental companions in front of a tent. Although he is behind them, Loïc recognizes him by his broad jaw, dark expression, clean-shaven face, and height; he appears to be about twenty. Régis had kept the reproduction because it was the only evidence that his grandfather enlisted in the Union Army, as many French Canadians did during the Civil War.

The photograph supplies proof of enlistment but little else. The Founder never spoke about this period, and an extensive search of Civil War records yielded no clear trace of a D’Anjou. Régis wondered whether the ancestor had anglicized his name. He thought he might have found an Eliah Dan Jow in the 20th Maine Regiment, known for its part in the Battle of Gettysburg, but the identification remained uncertain. A scar between the Founder’s ear and jaw might have been a war wound, yet the photograph and family silence cannot establish its cause. The United States is therefore both the place where the Founder began and the setting of a past whose records repeatedly fail to provide a conclusive identity.

New York and the Cameo’s Return

The country’s more recent history brings the concealed family object into a public catastrophe. When the World Trade Center complex appears on television in flames on September 11, Loïc recognizes the timing of the first plane’s impact, 8:46, as the moment of his nightmare. The broadcast shows the attacks in repeated sequences, while Loïc is shaken by the apparent correspondence between his dream and the disaster. What troubles him is not simply that he foresaw a building in flames: he believes he may have experienced the particular, hallucinated thoughts of another person, as though he had entered someone else’s mind, perhaps at the moment of death. The scene makes New York a site where his private, uncertain sensitivity collides with an event witnessed by the world.

The attacks also reactivate the family’s fear of the cameo. Loïc is distressed by everything September 11 has indirectly stirred around the fatal jewel, which seems to him to irradiate a curse accumulated over generations. His divided inheritance sharpens that response: he is a Bolduc through his father and a D’Anjou through his mother, and he grew up in the Founder’s House, where he felt the cameo’s occult pull from childhood. The stone’s American origin, the Founder’s American birth, and Loïc’s dream of New York gather into a single pattern, though the narrative leaves open whether that pattern is supernatural, psychological, or coincidence.

The later investigation confirms the cameo’s passage through a chain of American events without resolving every link. Loïc suspects that the object might have remained forgotten in a safe had Roger Bolduc not disappeared in New York. He intuits that Roger left with the cameo, partly because of the September 11 dream, but does not yet know the fact formally and fears that the D’Anjous in Québec might conceal it from him. Régis’s papers would also have renewed interest in the object; after learning that Roger had taken it, Loïc wonders whether an earlier examination of those papers might have prevented its removal, while recognizing that such a counterfactual cannot be known.

Much later, Rodrigo Lerbier tells Loïc what happened after the cameo reached Ground Zero: it passed into the hands of a Cuban émigré who had worked as an antiques dealer in Kansas City for roughly twenty years, then returned clandestinely to Cuba and died in a reported spontaneous combustion. Rodrigo cannot explain how the jewel travelled from Ground Zero to that dealer. The American locations in this account therefore form a route with a missing passage: New York supplies the point at which the cameo reappears, and Kansas City helps explain who possessed it, but the transfer between them remains unknown. Across the book, the United States holds records, images, and physical traces that bring the family closer to its beginnings while leaving the central mystery only partly exposed.