Ghosts can either be temporarily solid or completely ectoplasmic but they can't be both at the same time, not even a poltergeist like Daniel Gregg. He knew this but forgot about paranormal logistics while stuffing his mouth with Martha's last piece of cherry pie. He rose from the table, meaning to carry his dish magnanimously to the sink but ran smack into Martha as she turned to remove the soup tureen from the table. Captain Gregg managed to hold onto his plate but the Blue Willow bowl fractured into a thousand small pieces. Martha eyed the Captain warily. The kids froze. The room was deadly quiet until Carolyn's fork clattered, unbidden, onto her plate as she stared at the Captain with an intensity that was impossible to read. Candy and Jonathan snickered nervously – it was Martha who had cautioned them never to discuss the Captain's convenient corporality with their woefully clueless mother.
"They'll figure it out and when they do, everything will change," Martha foretold ominously just two weeks earlier. Candy, whose only experience of her mother and men revolved around her very-dead father, thought such a disclosure would cause great fights between the two. Jonathan hoped the Captain would just touch his mom on the nose and get it over with so the two of them could marry, thereby ensuring the continued presence of his nautical hero at Gull Cottage. For her part, Martha'd had just about enough of the unresolved sexual tension that permeated the atmosphere of any room the bickering duo inhabited. Longing, she wisely noted, was passive and required obstacles. Desire, well, there would be nothing passive about that once her employer and dear friend, who'd been celibate for over four years, caught up with the Captain. Carolyn might look like a cool cucumber, but she didn't fool Martha, who'd known her since the beautiful blonde's halcyon college days.
Yet now, at that very moment of reckoning, the two of them simply stared at each other. Captain Gregg did not dematerialize in the puerile fashion to which he had recently become accustomed. The ladylike but tempestuous Carolyn Muir did not throw her own pie plate at the Captain. The Harlequin moment would come later, if ever. "Kids, upstairs for baths. Now," Martha barked, hurriedly ushering them out of the kitchen. Jonathan and Candy, just beginning to grasp the seriousness of the situation, gawked at their mother, whose color was higher than they could ever remember. "Good night, kids," she began, her voice shaking, her eyes riveted on the Captain. "Go. Now." And they tread reluctantly up the stairs, tiptoeing lightly in the hopes of overhearing one iota of conversation that might augur well for their favored champ, the Captain. Instead, all they got was a barked snippet from their mother: "Daniel, please do your ghost thing and reassemble that soup tureen before Scruffy tears his tongue up trying to lick food off the fragments."
Then nothing. With Martha's tacit permission, the children even lingered on the landing, hoping for some sound of conciliatory talk or even gestures. Silence. "She can't keel-haul him in the kitchen," Jonathan mumbled on his way down the corridor. Candy was lost in thought, remembering how angry her mother could be towards a man. Martha meanwhile was scripting the excuses she'd be forced to offer up sometime in the morning, after Carolyn realized she'd been left out of the six-month party by her own housekeeper and offspring. Candy hopped into the tub first, scrubbing herself morosely with the pink washcloth. When she was dried and nightgowned-up, Jonathan crawled into the bathtub, held his breath and sank dramatically under the dwindling bubbles, wondering how it would feel to be dragged under a ship. The silence held downstairs until each of the Muir children reached their respective beds and Martha returned down the stairs and slunk unobtrusively, for a change, into her own bedroom.
Meanwhile, Carolyn's gaze remained fixed on the Captain, who wisely waited in order to better measure his response to hers. "Well," she offered quietly, once all was seemingly settled in the house. "I'll leave you to the dishes then." The Captain quickly wiggled a finger and the knives, forks and plates danced merrily toward the sink, leaving him to block the doorway to the foyer. His tender cornflower blue eyes gazed longingly down at Carolyn, begging her forgiveness. Her tear-filled green eyes flashed back. "Get out of my way, Daniel Gregg. Don't touch me. Now or ever." He reached for her arm as she twisted her way toward the stairs. She spun around, and standing on the first step, slapped him resoundingly across his face then leaned toward him until her lips were inches from his. "If you think this is the part where you get to sweep me off my feet, carry me kicking upstairs and spread my legs apart on 'our' bed you have another thing coming. Not now, not even in my afterlife." She almost carried this last off convincingly until the tears started pouring from her eyes and the Captain, an expert at bluster, realized hers for what it was and indeed swept her off her feet. Carolyn tightened her arms around his neck and cried into his soft gray sweater. "Not upstairs," she sobbed. "They'll all be listening."
"Nay, Madame," he murmured as he began up the stairs. "I've just blasted them all into a very sound slumber." As he reached the top he kissed her head and she squirmed slightly in his embrace, wondering if this were the time to raise her face to his and suffer the consequences. Instead, he deposited her lightly at their bedroom door, holding her closely until she regained her balance.
