Safe at home

There are only two or three, well, four, tops, things more intriguing than a long-locked safe of which no one knows the contents. Sitting around a taco restaurant waiting to see the server bring your fajitas while enveloped in a steamy miasma is one of them...seeing how big a prat your new boss is one...and peeling off a Maryland Lottery scratcher is a third. 

But here in Baltimore, there was a mystery of a big safe at a place called Red Emma's Bookstore, and the results were just as disappointing as the time Geraldo Rivera pried open Al Capone's vault to find the square root of zero.

No bags of money, no stock certificates or pieces of eight from a pirate shipwreck, and certainly no antique art or books, or even one of those kitchen wall clocks with a cat face and tail.

There was a scrap of history almost a century old, though: excited onlookers report finding a pay stub from February 1924. Someone worked for seven hours and was paid a little over $5.

I can hear a lot of schoolteachers out there right now, saying, "Righteous bucks!" 

A safe-cracker from Canada saw an online appeal from Red Emma's, looking for someone to swing open that door. He came, he saw it, he opened it, and his dreams of taking big money back to Canada crumbled like the Yankees' dreams of playing in the World Series. 

Too bad, Eugene!