Free The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn

returns with a stack of slim ledgers, years printed on their spines in faded gilt. He sets a white fingertip on the black face.
    â€œJanice, who is this man?”
    She seems to stiffen slightly. “He was with the school for a number of years—1857 to 1866, I believe.”
    â€œIn what capacity?”
    â€œHis duties were rather vaguely defined,” she answers slowly. “It appears he was brought on as a general custodian. Over time he became an integral member of the staff, it seems. You’ll find his record here,” she says, and rests her small hand on the ledgers.
    â€œDid he have a name?”
    â€œNemo Johnston.”
    â€œHis name was Johnston ?”
    â€œHe took the name of his owner, as was the custom.”
    Jacob looks at her for a long moment before he speaks again.
    â€œEighteen fifty-seven, you say.”
    â€œBefore the war.”
    Jacob shakes his head slowly as he looks back at the daguerreotype, the group portrait. Context , he thinks. Context is everything. His skills as a diagnostician have grown rusty.
    â€œBut why stay on? I mean after the war?”
    For answer Janice leans over and begins flipping through the other photographs in the folder, several of them showing Nemo Johnston in the anatomy lab and the other downstairs rooms of the old building. No cellar shots. There is one photograph in which he appears with his namesake in the lecture hall, Professor Johnston holding forth with a pointer in front of a skeleton, the slave and a young nurse looking on almost reverentially as Doctor Johnston addresses his students. Jacob pauses for a moment over the face of the nurse. It is turned in profile, but even so he sees that she was beautiful, with pronounced cheekbones and eyes pale and luminescent in the morning light of the lecture room. Even in black-and-white, he can see that her hair was as fair as his own.
    There is only one more photograph in the folder, and it arrests Jacob’s attention immediately. Another one taken inside Johnston Hall, he quickly determines. At the borders of the frame he can make out stark white light shining down through the tall windows of the current bursar’s office. But the men in the center of the photo seem swathed in shadow, the object on the table before the four students little more than a mass of darkness save for the bright gleaming bones the dissectors have laid bare of the ebony skin. Yet clearly no snapshot. This portrait was posed, the men dressed in dark frocks, each of them wearing a sort of Shriner’s cap on which is embossed a skull over two crossed bones. The students are grinning like hunters posed over a trophy, shoulder-to-shoulder behind the dissecting table. One of them has spread an anatomy book—probably Gray’s —across the cadaver’s pelvis and is gesturing to another who holds a scalpel. The young man at the other end of the table is smirking, his hand over the cadaver’s mouth.
    The image, despite its medical accoutrements, reminds him of photos he has seen of lynchings. Except that in front of the table, smiling like a minstrel, his dark face split by teeth bared white, kneels Nemo Johnston. The slave holds up the cadaver’s right hand—most of its fingers stripped of the flesh down to the bony knuckles—in a playful wave for the camera.
    The poor, dumb bastard. Jacob feels a stirring of disgust in his stomach. He wonders what Adam would think of this, how he would interpret this photograph as any part of coming clean about the bones in the basement.
    â€œThe Skull and Crossbones Club,” Janice says. “That photograph is probably from the 1860s. Nemo Johnston was a sort of unofficial mascot for the club in its early years.”
    â€œI always thought Skull and Crossbones was just a legend. People talk about it, but nobody ever claims to be a member.”
    â€œIsn’t that the nature of secret societies?”
    â€œYou think it’s