The Sleepwalker(86)

And this time it won’t be a dream.





YES, LIANNA, YES. Since you wonder but are afraid to ask, I’ll tell you. Live with it. I do.

Mom wasn’t out sleepwalking. Mom was out looking for me.





Acknowledgments


ONCE AGAIN, THANKS are in order.

First of all, the experts: Dr. Garrick Applebee, a sleep medicine physician, for teaching me about sleepwalking and other parasomnias; Mike Cannon, with the Colchester, Vermont, Technical Rescue Team, and Essex, Vermont, police officer Andrew Graham, for discussing with me the specifics of search and rescue; Emmet Helrich, formerly a lieutenant with the Burlington Police Department and now the coordinator for Vermont’s rapid intervention community court, for helping me understand how this sort of investigation would proceed; Michael Mangan, PhD, for his book Sleepsex: Uncovered; and Dr. Steven Shapiro, chief medical examiner for the state of Vermont, who shared with me the mysteries of the morgue.

I am deeply grateful to my friends at Doubleday for all they do before (and after) my books are published: Todd Doughty, Emma Dries, Jenny Jackson, and John Pitts.

And then there are my agents: thank you, Jane Gelfman, Cathy Gleason, Victoria Marini, Deborah Schneider, and Brian Lipson.

Finally, I want to thank Victoria Blewer and Grace Experience, two of my earliest and best readers—always.





A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Chris Bohjalian is the author of nineteen books, including such New York Times bestsellers as The Guest Room, The Light in the Ruins, The Sandcastle Girls, The Double Bind, and Skeletons at the Feast. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his books have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). His novels have been chosen as best books of the year by The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Hartford Courant, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Salon. He lives in Vermont. Visit him at www.chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook or Twitter.