Haley,
JeanDoe has given some excellent advice here, and I can relate to both it and your predicament on a very personal level.
When was about your age, had just graduated from university, and had recently accepted a job in a small town away from where I grew up, I also rented a small studio apartment as my first place of my own after moving out of my parents' home. My "stash" was still quite small at the time, and I also kept it in a locked suitcase in my only clothes closet. It wasn't so much visitors I feared, but my nosy landlord possibly going through my apartment while I was not there, as he had a key to the place for security purposes.
Good thing too, as a fire broke out in the building while I was away for the weekend not long after I moved in. Fortunately, my apartment only suffered smoke damage (that's a whole other story!), but I did come back to find my landlord sitting guard in it with all the doors and windows open to air it out. Thank goodness for the locked suitcase, which was still intact. I can only imagine the repercussions if I had been outed in this manner, especially in a small town where gossip spreads like wildfire. Even worse, this was many years ago, when the GLBT community was still deep in the closet, the concept of CDing was virtually unknown (we were still those perverted, fetishistic "transvestites" in most peoples' minds), and pioneering transsexual Christine Jorgensen was still a world-wide sensation.