Still in a daze, she reached for the handle again. This time the safe yawned open with a creak after at least five years of inactivity. As she pushed the door back, tears bubbled up in her eyes again.
Before he had died, Reverend Crane had told her on the mainland she had been an awful person, a thief and a murderer. He claimed that was why he had brought her here, so she might be "purified" by The Way. Samantha hadn't believed him then, but staring at the safe, she began to have her doubts. Who else but a thief would know how to unlock a safe without knowing the combination? And if the reverend had been right about that, then perhaps he had been right about everything.
She tried to shake these thoughts away. She remembered the last five years on Eternity. She hadn't stolen so much as a crust of bread during that time. She had been good and responsible, Miss Brigham's best helper. Whatever Reverend Crane had given her it couldn't have changed who she was inside, could it?
Once her latest batch of tears had faded into hiccups again, Samantha began to look through the contents of the safe. It didn't take long for her to understand Pryde hadn't hidden any kind of blackmail in here. Instead, she saw boxes full of jewelry, coins, and even a container of gold teeth. Pryde had taken all of this from his victims, no doubt saving it to fund his adventures on the mainland. She again felt a sick feeling in her stomach at this thought.
As with the clothes, the coins in the safe dated from different eras. Samantha pulled out a misshaped gold coin with the crude profile of a man on it. Someone had scratched '1642' into the coin. That had been over three hundred fifty years ago! The most recent coin was a silver one-a quarter, her mind recalled-dated from 1999. She ran the grooved edges of the coin between her fingers. Like the ancient coin, the quarter had a profile of a man on the front. On the back she saw the words, "United States of America."
Those words seemed very familiar to her. She must have come from the United States of America. Pryde had taken her from there and brought her here. She tucked the quarter into a pocket of her jeans to study it later.
At the top of a box near the front of the safe, she found something unusual. It was a chain made not of silver like some of the coins but a dull metal like the safe itself. A pendant shaped like half a heart cut in broken edges down the middle and made of the same metal hung from the chain. She turned the pendant over to see the words 'BE FRIE FOR' carved into the metal. Be Frie For? What did that mean? Was it some other language?