Excerpt from The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"If I lowered the feeders," he suggested, "you could fill them yourself."

She dug her fists into her hips. "I'm quite put out about this," she said. All at once she sounded near tears, an unexpected key change that sped things up on Quinn's end.

"Let me get to it," he said.

"I'll be inside." She aimed a knuckly finger toward her door. "I can supervise just as well through the window." She spoke with a zeal at odds with her physical frailty, and Quinn doubted for the first time Belle's word that Ona Vitkus was 104 years old. Since the boy's death, Belle's view of reality had gone somewhat gluey. Quinn was awed by her grief, cowed by its power to alter her. He wanted to save her but had no talent for anything more interpersonally complicated than to obey commands as a form of atonement. Which was how he'd wound up here, under orders from his twice-ex-wife, to complete their son's good deed.

The shed had peeling double doors that opened easily. The hinges looked recently oiled. Inside, he found a stepladder with a broken rung. The place reeked of animal—not dog or cat, something grainier; mice, maybe. Or skinny, balding, fanged rats. Garden implements, seized with rust, hung in a diagonal line on the far wall, points and prongs and blades facing out. He considered the ways the boy could have been hurt on this weekly mission of mercy: ambushed by falling timber, gnawed by vermin—Troop 23's version of bait and switch.

But the boy had not been hurt. He had been, in his words, "inspired."

Quinn found the birdseed in a plastic bucket that he recognized. It had once held the five gallons of joint compound with which he'd repaired the walls of Belle's garage—before their final parting, before she returned his rehearsal space to a repository for paint thinner and plant poisons and spare tires. Inside the bucket Quinn found a king-size scoop, shiny and cherry red, jolly as a prop in a Christmas play. On a nearby shelf he spotted nine more scoops, identical. The boy was a hoarder. He kept things that could not be explained. On the day before the funeral, Belle had opened the door to the boy's room, instructing Quinn to look around if he wanted, but to remove nothing, touch nothing. So, he counted. Bird nests: 10; copies of Old Yeller: 10; flashlights: 10; piggy banks: 10; Boy Scout manuals: 10. He had Popsicle sticks , acorns, miniature spools of the sort found in ladies' sewing kits, everything corralled into tidy ten-count groupings.

Excerpted from The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood. Copyright © 2017 by Monica Wood. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.