The year that I discovered that children can die in horrible ways was the same year that Ronald Reagan became president of the United States and the same year that MTV launched. I was nine, and in general it was a hideous year—although in the case of Reagan ascending to the presidency, that is something I wouldn’t understand until later. But in August 1981, I found my grandmother staring moist-eyed at the television screen in the oppressively hot living room of her house.

“I’m going out to play,” I announced loudly. There were witch brews to be made from sticks and dirt and those red yew berries I was warned to never eat. I would never have admitted to still playing witch to anyone who asked why I was carting a plastic bucket around my grandparents’ rambling green property, but in the rural hinterlands of Berwick, Pennsylvania—especially on a steamy summer morning—there was nothing else to do. And on a rare day when my younger brother was elsewhere, unable to tag along and pester me, savoring the lazy golden sun while mixing random ingredients together for spellcasting and love potions felt decadently wonderful.

But then my grandmother said the words that no kid wants to hear: “Why don’t you stay in the house today?”

“Graaaaaammy, no. I’ll sweat to death in here.”

The second I said death, my grandmother—a tough (if not overly talkative and flighty) middle-aged woman who had been a dairy farmer for a good number of her married years—began to wring her strong hands. She looked at the television and then she looked back at me.

“We’ll go to the mall and buy you a new book.”

Normally a new book and the bribe of the ice-locker-air-conditioned mall would have been enough for me, but on that day the humidity steamed my enormous round glasses just standing still in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. I huffed the three steps to the green flowered couch that had seen better days and dramatically threw myself onto it, folding my arms over my yellow tank top.

“I don’t want a new book. I want to be outside.”

She clucked for a moment before spitting.

“We’re going to the mall. Don’t sass me, young lady. We’re leaving right now—right now.”

There was no arguing with a “young lady” because after the “young lady” came the spanking, which at nine I was way too old for and I had to pretend it hurt or risk my grandmother trying to break her arm off in the pursuit of enough punishment to get through to me and my stubborn pre-teen angst.

Grammy turned off the television nestled in the giant wooden console and waited until the news (it was always the news she was watching) faded to gray and then black. She shut the doors over the screen. I shoved my feet into worn purple flip-flops and moped after her to the garage, which was at least slightly cooler if not smellier—gas, paint thinner, and dirt. My plastic bucket sat lonely in the corner closest to the garage door. When I was all packed into the cranberry-red Ford LTD, my grandmother slowly backed out of the garage and flicked on the radio.

“ . . . has been identified as Adam Walsh, the six-year-old boy who went missing from a Hollywood, Florida mall last month.”

My grandmother glanced at me, eyes narrowed, and clicked to a different station that was playing a Commodores song. I expected her to twist the tuning knob until she found Conway Twitty twanging away or maybe some bluegrass—she always called the music I liked “that noise”—but she left it, white-knuckling the steering wheel until we were out of the driveway and halfway out of town. I rolled down the window and sang the next song into the hot wind.

Finally, my grandmother poked at her mud-brown beehive and said, “Nicki, you know that if someone you don’t know—an adult, I mean, and a stranger—tries to talk to you or tries to get you to go somewhere with them, you shouldn’t, right?” Before I had a chance to answer, she said, “When I was a kid, there was this old man that used to hang around town—real dirty, dirty clothes, looked like he hadn’t taken a bath in a whole year—looking hard at little boys.”

“So?”

“Now, listen to me. I’m talking to you. My brother Chauncy—Mother sent him to the corner store for some milk, and the old man asked him, well, it doesn’t matter what he wanted—he didn’t get it. Chauncy kicked him and ran home, told Mother and Dad, and—I’m telling you that we all knew that old man was funny. He had funny tastes. Never saw him with a woman, just little kids. But it doesn’t matter. We knew to stay away from him, and that was that.”

“Uh-huh.” I focused on the metal beams of the bridge over the brown waters of the Susquehanna River, the one that connected Berwick to Nescopeck, whizzing by. Grammy’s stories about growing up were almost always long and boring. They usually involved being dirt poor and having to wear hand-me-downs from her fourteen brothers and sisters. I sniffed out the window. The air smelled like low tide—fishy and mucky. The hum of the bridge under the tires of her car was almost a high-pitched squeal.

“That boy they’re talking about on the news, that Adam Walsh, he was only six.”

“Who’s Adam Walsh?”

“I’m telling you. He’s a little boy who lived in Florida. It’s not right. I don’t want to scare you, but they only found that poor boy’s head.”

That got my attention. “What happened to him?”

“No one knows. His mother took him to the mall, next thing she knows, he’s gone. They think he was probably kidnapped but then they found his sweet little head in a canal. That could have been Chauncy if he didn’t know enough to run away. Or you. Or your brother—why, when I think about it—”

“Grammy, aren’t we going to a mall?”

Her eyes went as big as dinner plates. She swung her big cranberry boat of a car into a U-turn halfway through Nescopeck and almost clipped the squat tree in front of the red brick church on the corner. With a screech of tires, the car came to an abrupt stop at the side of the road.

“You think this is funny?”

Hardly. But why would Grammy take me to the mall after telling me a boy was kidnapped from a mall and killed? Was she trying to tell me something? Maybe she wanted me to get taken and killed. Maybe she just wanted to test me. Maybe the humidity had gotten to her. It wouldn’t be the first time the steam and the boredom would drive a body to do something horrible.

“A little boy was murdered,” she yelled, “and you and your brother ride your bikes all over creation and I can’t watch you every second of the day when you’re at my house, and what if that had been you? What—”

We didn’t go to the mall that day, and it was weeks before my grandmother let me out of her sight while babysitting. It was weeks of me imagining why she’d wanted to go to the mall. Months of nightmares about being kidnapped. About waking up without my head. About my friends turning up missing and found dismembered. And I hadn’t thought of it until two years ago—thirty-eight years after Adam Walsh’s death.

It was spring. Time for my mother’s annual spring cleaning of some dusty nook of the house. Of course, by then I knew exactly who Adam Walsh was—and his father, John Walsh. I wasn’t a reality television aficionado, but who hadn’t seen at least one episode of America’s Most Wanted at some point in their life? I was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs for breakfast when my phone rang.

“I found a box full of your old records,” my mother said when I answered. “Do you want them?”

“I don’t know. Do I need them?”

“You might. Your original birth certificate is in here. That’s something you probably want to squirrel away. Some old vaccination records—and a set of your fingerprints.”

“My fingerprints? When was I fingerprinted?”

“The date on them says 1982, so I guess you were nine or ten. You don’t remember it? It was the year after a bunch of kids were kidnapped and killed, and there was this big push to fingerprint kids in case they were abducted. The cops came to your school and did a stranger danger assembly and fingerprinted all of you.”

Adam Walsh, the gap-toothed boy in the red baseball hat. My grandmother nearly mowing down that tree in Nescopeck. It came back to me, crystal clear. I don’t know how many kids were fingerprinted in 1982 or any of the years since Ronald Reagan signed the Missing Children’s Act (probably one of the least odious acts of his presidency, but that’s another story for another day), but it has to be in the hundreds of thousands. Even today, you can order a Child ID Card, although now they recommend you collect not just fingerprints but DNA samples. Sometimes I wonder how nine-year-old me would have reacted to how much more we know about child abductors now: the sex trafficking (which wasn’t even illegal in the U.S. until President Bill Clinton signed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 into law), the fact that “stranger danger” is usually the least of a kid’s worries when it comes to sexual abuse or kidnapping. Far fewer than one percent of children who go missing each year are taken by strangers, according to the Polly Klaas Foundation.

As much as I lost sleep over it back then, after my grandmother told me about Adam Walsh, I might have never slept again, worrying about all my friends walking to school, walking to the store, walking around malls—imagining that they were being hurt or disappeared by people they know. So much scarier than Stranger Danger.

I still have that fingerprint card in my records. Of course, it may not do my husband any good should I get taken, either by a stranger or someone I know. Fingerprints can change over time. Kids still disappear all the time. So, too, do adults. If I’d been smarter as a child, perhaps I would have played witch more often, mixing random ingredients together to cast a spell for protection and safety. Or, at the very least, for my grandmother (or anyone) to have never had to know the name of Adam Walsh.

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