Short Story Saturday

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was a lady. We'll call her Carrie.
Carrie made her living selling houses to other people. She sold these houses to all kinds of people. Rich, poor, old, and young. She didn't care, as long as they had a loan large enough to cover the price of the house that she sold them.
Carrie would travel quite a distance to sell houses, too. She was known to go as many as two counties over to sell a house. She did not know the meaning of the word "weekend", or "evening", and would often miss family events, or time with her friends because she was so caught up in her work. As a consequence, she had very few friends, and her family, who had no choice but to like her, knew better then to really believe that she would ever be at their events.
Almost 12 years into her career, times got lean in the housing market. People were not making payments anymore, they did not have the income to do so. Nor were they buying houses, for the same reason. This made Carrie even more tenacious when it came to her job. Every potential buyer that called her got her full, undivided attention. If she heard a rumor that they had even LOOKED in another direction, at another realtor, her jealous hackles rose, and she would put a stop to it. One way, or another. Frankly, she scared many of her customers, who would find a way to buy a house just to get away from her.
Now it happened one day, Carrie needed to come up to the foothills, to a place unfamiliar. A nice man had called her to see a particular house, and, in her mind, why show him just one, when she could show him two or three? Granted, she wasn't from the area, and didn't quite know her way around, but armed with Google maps, Tom-Tom, and her sense of fashion, she was sure she could make it anywhere. Armed with all of this (and a pair of high heeled boots) Carrie left for them thar hills. Following Google, and Tom-Tom, she found herself...
lost.
Reaching out to touch someone with her cell phone, she first called her secretary, Lance. She told him "if I am not back in 2.5 hours, send a helicopter. They don't even have pavement up here!".
"Sure babe" answers Lance, not even listening, really. It was Sunday morning, and he put up with enough crap from her during the week. He didn't care if she went out and drove off the face of the earth. Matter of fact. He might give her directions.
Irritated, she took a few, deep cleansing breaths, then called her potential client. Trying to sound sweet and amenable, she told him "I am on a dirt road somewhere!" Truth told, she sounded more frantic than amenable.
The very amiable man that she'd come to coerce into a home did his best to direct her to a mutually accessible place to meet, but, yet, tom-tom failed her again. Once again, reaching out to touch someone, she again called her assistant. "Seriously, this place is in the boondocks of hell" she groused to him. "I don't know how these people live up here. I mean, I haven't even seen a Neiman Marcus!" Lance rolled his eyes at her dramatics, unimpressed. Yawning, he poured himself another cup of coffee and listened to her yammer on a few more minutes. When she wound down, he promised her a cup of non fat coffee and a cherry scone would be waiting for her on her desk Monday morning. Mollified, she got off the phone, and called her client AGAIN, trying not to sound desperate.
Finally, her client located the gas station she was fearfully parked at. Getting out of her Acura, she reminded herself to smile, and look care free. As she strutted across the parking lot, her clients girlfriend, and his daughter tried not to laugh hysterically at her high heeled boots, high water tweed pants, and her jacket with the faux fur collar. "Hope there is no snow at any of those houses" girlfriend whispered. Daughter, mischievously whispered back "I hope there is!"
When the nice man agreed that she should just follow them to the first house they wanted to see, Carrie breathed a sigh of relief. He did not look frightening, but in these parts one never knew. Before long, they pulled up in front of the first house.
"How perfectly boring" she thought to herself as she dutifully gave them the tour of a house she'd never been in. The man ignored her, and headed straight into the garage, while the girlfriend critiqued the kitchen, and the daughter went to look at bedrooms. Yawning, she waited for them to finish, and tried to gather some information from them that she could use later to entice them into buying a more expensive house.
Leaving the first house, she once again called Lance, then got irritated when he did not answer his phone. Clicking her blue ear piece off, she took it out and threw it up onto the dash. It broke into three pieces. "Cheap piece of crap" she grumbled. As they got out at the next house, she looked in dismay at the stairs leading up to the front door. "Have these people never heard of elevators?" she thought to herself. She was also annoyed because there was another realtor there, showing this house to someone else. She did not like her thunder stolen by anyone. Plus, this house was more costly than the first, and she wanted the commission.
To her irritation, the man, his daughter, and girlfriend did not like this house at all. They kept mumbling about feeling claustrophobic, getting a bad vibe, and being watched. "What, do they think it's haunted?" she thought to herself. (Yes, they did.).
Gratefully, she accepted the man's offer to drive her out to a place in the god forsaken town that led her to the freeway, and back to civilization. Once on her way, though, she realized she'd left her cell phone at the second house. She would have just left it there, if it hadn't been for the fact that the case had been specially bejeweled for her by her last boyfriend, and, all her appointments were loaded into it. Sighing, she exited, and managed to find her way back into the second house. Walking up the stairs, she got very pissed when one of the heels from her boots got stuck in a plank, and broke off. Kicking the railing, she gasped as it broke away, and she nearly fell. "I am going to sell this house to rotten people" she snarled, balefully and yanked her heel free. Stumbling up the rest of the stairs, she worked for 10 minutes before getting the lock box open. Once inside, she searched, to no avail for her phone. (It was in her pocket the whole time.). Cursing and shaking her fist at the house, she went into every room she'd been in. Saving the creepy downstairs for last...
Monday morning rolled around, and Lance placed the cherry scone, and fat free coffee on her desk as instructed. By monday afternoon, not a speck of it had been touched. Concerned, Lance phoned her cell, numerous times. Each time, all he heard at the other end, was a cackle, and the toilet flushing, He stopped calling. Instead, he took her clients around, and, surprised at having someone nice for a change try to sell them homes, he actually sold 3 of them in one week.
And Carrie? No one has heard from her, since. Her family never reported her missing, because she was ALWAYS missing.
But there is tale, at a house in the country, in the dead of dawn, of a woman heard weeping for a cherry scone, and a non fat cup of coffee...