“Dawthy!” Auntie Phlegm gasped.
“How could you?! You wicked, wicked witch! Ellie the Ghoul! It’s what you are, hurting an innocent little dog! A witch and a ghoul!”
Auntie Phlegm looked as if she were going to faint right onto the floor. Chunk and Mapleface stared at each other with their mouths hanging open. Uncle Henny kept his eyes downcast, looking rather mournfully at the picnic basket, although when Dawthy blurted out Elmira’s nickname, a tiny smirk tugged at his lips.
“What did you call me?” Elmira’s voice pitched up to the level of a train whistle, and enough spit flew to hit everyone fairly. “Say that again, you squalid, dirty little moppet! I dare you!”
“What’s a moppet?” Chunk asked no one in particular. Likewise, no one answered him.
“ELLIE THE GHOUL!” Dawthy’s face went as red as Elmira’s tomatoes as she screeched the nickname. “GHOULGHOULGHOUL!”
“Now, Dawthy,” Auntie Phlegm cut in, “she did come to apologize and bring Utoh back.”
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” Elmira slapped her hand over her mouth. She hadn’t realized she was still screaming.
But Dawthy was now looking at Auntie Phlegm.
“Don’t you care?” she whispered.
“Of course I care, but what’s done can’t be undone.”
“Moppet,” said Chunk.
“It’s a terrible thing but it was an accident, and we’re forgiving people,” Uncle Henny added.
“So that’s it?” Dawthy looked from Phlegm to Henny to Mapleface. Chunk had a blank stare as he was still contemplating “moppet”, so she passed him by. “She kills Utoh in cold blood and gets away with it? Where are the consequences? Didn’t you teach me that every bad action has consequences?”
“But a bad action is intentional, that’s what we meant,” Auntie Phlegm said gently. “This was an accident.”
“It was, it was, it was purely self-defense,” Elmira chimed in. She nodded so vigorously that a spit-string stuck to her lower lip began to flap up and down. Chunk, who had a notoriously short attention span, immediately forgot the meaning of “moppet” and fixated on this. “I only tried to keep the little ankle biter at bay. Look! If you could see my forearm, why, there’s a great bloody bitemark on it from where I kept him away from my face!”
Elmira only said this because she was wearing a long-sleeve blouse, but then, you probably guessed that.
Uncle Henny raised an eyebrow at that. “Did you give the feller an extension ladder to get up there?”