SANDPOINT — Is there anything more mysterious, more alluring than a locked safe for which no one knows the combination?

Just such a safe has been sitting inside the former service station building at 120 Cedar St. and it has captured the imagination of Jennifer Ferguson, who opened her new business, ShakaPaw Pet Market, there about two weeks ago.

“I’ve tried to open it several times,” she said. “I looked up a YouTube video and put this little doohickey on it, but I don’t have enough patience to just sit there that long and keep working on it.

“I think I’ve got a couple of the numbers, but I won’t know until I can open it — or somebody else does,” she added.

It’s the “somebody else” aspect that has got the town buzzing, since Ferguson is offering a pet product-related prize to the first person who can crack the combination and swing wide the hefty, steel door.

One possible resource might be Susan Dalby, whose father, Dave, owned the service station in the early 1970s. The business began as a Humble Oil location, owned by the partnership of Holzmer and Haviland. It subsequently changed hands to new partners Haviland and Luckey, who later sold it to Dalby as an Enco station.

That gave him a true corner of the market, since he already owned the Exxon station located catty-corner at 330 N. First Ave. It was there that the safe originally resided and, somehow, Dalby managed to roll the heavy block of metal over to his newest acquisition.

According to his daughter, Dalby used the object both as a business safe and a handy place to perch a cup of coffee while he was working on vehicles.

“Dad and my brother David used to open the ‘mystery safe’ every day,” she said. “But it’s been 40 years since that happened.”

About the size of an antique icebox, the safe is substantial enough that moving it – even with its metal wheels — is no mean feat. Ferguson learned that when she moved it to paint the floor in her pet market and found that its sheer weight scarred the paint job when she was ready to move it back to the original spot.

Emblazoned with the words, “Hall’s Safe Co. – Cincinnati” on the door, the box was likely produced sometime between 1906 and 1927, when the company went bankrupt. Rumor had it that some former owner had written the combination on the safe, later scratching it out to obscure the code. A perusal of the four sides and the top reveals no such information and Ferguson said she had already checked its underside, as well.

Grabbing her cell phone, Dalby made a quick call to her brother to see if he has any recollection of even a part of the combination, but came up empty.

“He said you turn it twice all the way to the left,” she shared upon ending the call. “But after that? Nobody can remember.”

Both Dalby and Ferguson hope that something – anything – will be found inside when and if the mystery gets solved. What they don’t want is to recreate the famously embarrassing moment when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on live TV in April of 1986 and found – nothing at all.

“Who knows?” Dalby asked. “Maybe the last time dad or David closed it, they hadn’t gone to the bank.”

Aside from the prospect of finding an errant, 40-year-old bank deposit is the possibility that it could conceal some kind of time capsule, a message the service station owner secreted away for a future tenant to find.

“That’s what I would have done,” said Ferguson. “I’d be thinking, ‘This thing’s going to be left behind, so maybe I’ll hide something in it.’”

It will be a hanging question until some lucky safe cracker manages to get the twists and turns in the right order, crank the handle down and open the door. One semi-professional recently tried his hand at the job, but left empty handed.

“There was a banker who stopped in with his family during Lost in the ‘50s, the weekend I opened,” Ferguson said. “He spent about 30 minutes trying to open it, turning and listening and trying again. You could tell he had a passion for it.”

Passion, however, was no match for the technological prowess of the Hall’s Safe Co., leaving the door just as locked – and the mystery just as intact – as ever.

Feeling lucky? Well, are ya? Stop by ShakaPaw Pet Market on the corner of Second and Cedar and give it a try.