Abandon

abandon
verb, transitive. To give something up completely. To discontinue a scheduled event before completion. To cease to support or look after someone. To desert. To leave a place empty or uninhabited, without intending to return. To leave a vessel or vehicle decisively, as an act of survival. To condemn someone or something to a specified fate by ceasing to take an interest in or look after them. Also a noun.

Even though it was nearly noon, the light filtered through the dust on the windows was dim. Hal and Sophie paused just inside the door and looked around. Chairs were pushed away from desks as if their occupants had just gotten up to take a break. Piles of papers still filled inboxes. Hal could read the heading of the blotter calendar on the nearest desk: May, 2003. The dust roused by their entrance hung and swirled like mist.

“They abandoned this place a long time ago,” Sophie said. “I wonder why they never came back and packed any of this up.”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Hal told her as he advanced to the desk with the calendar. He stood looking down at it, not wanting to sit in the long-unused chair. He hoped the calendar would furnish clues as to why the staff had suddenly left one day and never returned. Experience had taught him that calendars couldn’t always be trusted. People got busy and forgot to tear off the top page when the month ended. Hal had done it himself. There was something scrawled on the nineteenth day, however. He stooped and squinted. Reluctantly, he wiped the dust aside with the side of his palm, trying not to add it to that already thick in the air. “Hargrove 2:30,” was all it said. He read it aloud and was surprised when Sophie gasped.

“I know who that is!” she cried.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.