The two other victims, 5-year-old twin girls Hayley and Taylor Ryan, remain hospitalized. Their parents issued a statement yesterday.

“Our daughters are fighters. Please keep them in your prayers. Believe in miracles.”

The parents indicated that the girls are still in a coma.

Visibly shaken, Adam Larsen, 34, spoke to reporters outside his home in historic Port Gamble.

“We are grieving for the families who have lost their children and for the bus driver’s family too. This touches all of us here. I doubt many of us will ever get over it.”

Larsen’s daughter, Starla, also 5, was a member of the Daisy troop. She, however, did not go on the outing due to minor illness.

ELECTRICAL FAILURE LED TO FATAL HOOD CANAL CRASH

A spokesman for the Washington State Department of Transportation said today that the school bus crash killing five was a “tragic combination of the weather and an electrical fault that caused the span to open.”

It had not been opened by the bridge tender, as previously reported.

Among the dead were Christina Lee, 7; Sarah Benton, 6; Violet Caswell, 5; and Emma Perkins, also 5. Also killed was bus driver Margie Jones, 29. Jones, according to the North Kitsap School District records office, was an exemplary employee. She was completing her master’s degree in education and was working as an activity bus driver. She’d planned to teach next fall.

“She wanted nothing more than to do something for kids,” said Barry Jones, her husband of five years.

Three of the survivors remain hospitalized. One, a 30-year-old Port Gamble woman, has been released.

The next one was a new one, an article that hadn’t been posted in any newspaper archive that she’d seen when she Googled the crash for the first time a few years ago:

BRIDGE TENDER CLEARED IN FATAL BUS CRASH

Timothy Robbinette, the 44-year-old bridge tender on duty the afternoon a school bus crashed killing four Port Gamble girls and the driver, was cleared when the Washington State Department of Transportation released its final report late last night.

“While there was concern that operator error or negligence might have been a factor in the accident, a full investigation has attributed the accident to a mechanical/electrical failure and not operator error, as had been suggested in the press.”

When contacted by members of the media last night, Robinette, who has been on administrative leave, said he was “satisfied” about the panel’s findings but indicated he would not be returning to work.

“Too many sad, bad memories there for me,” he said.

As Taylor read, she noticed another clipping had been attached. It was a funeral notice:

ROBBINETTE, TIMOTHY

Husband and father Timothy Robbinette will be remembered at the Chimacum Lutheran Church on Saturday at 1 p.m. Robbinette, 44, died in an apparent gun accident at his home on Wednesday. Cake and coffee will follow the service.

Taylor checked the date on the article and the date of Timothy Robbinette’s funeral, which was written in her mother’s familiar handwriting. The events were four days apart.

Four days apart? What’s all this about?

Taylor glanced over at Hedda, who was oblivious to all but the warmth of the heat coming from the furnace. In contrast, Taylor’s heart rate was speeding up and she felt that sick feeling that came with anxiety.

Her parents, and especially her mother, Valerie, refused to talk about the bus crash. Whenever she or Hayley brought it up, their mom would change the subject. For the past few years, the twins had felt something wasn’t quite right about what had happened that terrible day. One thing they’d never been told was facing Taylor right there on the page of a newspaper. Her parents had never said the police once thought the crash had been caused by a man named Timothy Robbinette.

Taylor’s mind was still reeling when two yellowed pieces of paper stopped her cold. The first was an article from the Daily Olympian:

WARDEN’S DAUGHTER MISSING FOR TWO DAYS FOUND

Relief came today with the discovery of nine-year-old Valerie Fitzpatrick, the daughter of McNeil Island Prison Warden Chester Fitzpatrick. The girl, found alive and unharmed, had been missing for at least two days. She was discovered by her mother in a service area under the prison itself—a place that had been searched thoroughly when she first went missing. It is unclear how it was that young Valerie was not discovered during the earliest stage of the search.

“We are grateful for the volunteers, both inmates and staff, who helped in the search for our little girl,” Warden Fitzpatrick wrote in a statement to the press. “It was a very difficult time for our family.”

According to the statement, the girl disappeared from her bedroom in the warden’s quarters outside the prison walls the night before last and somehow ended up inside the prison in the service corridor that provides steam, electricity, and passage for maintenance crews.

“Staff kids have been known to play in the area, which is off-limits. A review of making the location more secure is now underway,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

McNeil Island houses 640 inmates, with 19 currently on death row.

Death row inmate Tony Ortega was scheduled for execution Friday. However, with the prison on lockdown, the governor stayed the execution. A new date will be set for the 20-year-old convicted of murdering his father and mother three years ago in Seattle.

A final piece of paper was included in the small stack. It was a letter from Savannah Osteen, dated back when the twins were babies, around the time of her videotaped research session:

Dear Mrs. Ryan:

First I want to apologize for the way things transpired after my last session with your beautiful and very bright girls. While I meant no harm, I know that my comments and persistence caused you a lot of pain. I should have taken a step back to better understand that you wanted some things in your family to remain private. My only defense is that I find your daughters and their ability to know things, dark things, quite remarkable. Even as I write that last sentence, I see how words cannot do justice to the magnitude of what you told me and what I witnessed.

I have called and left numerous messages on your answering machine. Per your request, I will not try to contact your husband again. I want you to know that I will not share the contents of the video tape with anyone. Nor will I disclose what I know about your daughters and what they are capable of. You have my word on it. I am not a mother, though I hope to be one day. I hope that when and if I am blessed with a child, I will be as loving and strong an advocate for my child as you have been for Hayley and Taylor.

Sincerely,

Savannah Osteen,

Researcher, University of Washington,

Linguistics Laboratories

Seattle, WA

What? Taylor could barely breathe. She stuffed the papers back into the manila envelope and stared absently at her laptop screen, wondering when Hayley would come home. Taylor wasn’t sure what to think. She knew only one thing to be true: Mr. Hayden’s idiotic report had just made her life much more interesting. And a little scary.