Find a Penny

Three weeks after Penny and Wooton's wedding, Whit and Connie are at Whit's End admiring the wedding photos when Wooton bursts in, freshly back from his honeymoon and in a panic. Penny is not at home, she is not answering her phone, and Wooton cannot explain where she is - because, as he blurts out, "I also lost my memory!" He woke up that morning in the Buffalo, New York airport with no idea how he got there, and the last time he can clearly remember seeing Penny is their wedding day. He searched the airport, had Penny paged, and left a voicemail on her phone, but she has not called back. Alarmed, Whit insists on taking him straight to the hospital.

Dr. Graham examines Wooton and finds no concussion or injury, so she orders blood work and tells him he must stay put until they figure out what is wrong. She privately reassures Whit that Wooton shows no signs of being attacked, and advises that familiar details from the missing weeks might help his memories resurface, usually in bits and pieces.

The clues begin with the postcards Penny mailed to their friends. Connie's postcard, written on the airplane, mentions a seatmate who knitted Penny a hat - and that detail unlocks Wooton's first memory. He recalls Francine, a proper older lady with yellow yarn, who chatted with the giddy newlyweds and accidentally spoiled Wooton's carefully guarded surprise by revealing that the plane was headed to Paris. Whit's postcard came from Paris and mentions Ernest, a friendly hotel bellhop who planned to show them the sunset from the Eiffel Tower and treat them to crepes. Wooton remembers meeting Ernest, but after that, everything goes blank.

Then comes a breakthrough: a new voicemail from Penny herself. She is safe, though her phone was run over by a taxi, and she explains that the couple was rebooked onto separate flights home. She chatters happily about a museum "that looks like it's wearing a red hat," a mini-fridge with pineapple juice, and room 442, and signs off, "Love you, my flying squirrel." But she never actually says what city she is in. Penny could be anywhere.

Jason Whittaker arrives with his own postcard - sent from London, where Wooton apparently sang on stage with his favorite band, the Pool Boys. Jason has even found a video of it online: Wooton, inexplicably dressed in scuba gear in the front row, is invited up, thanks everyone from his kindergarten teacher to a hotel concierge named Pablo, and belts out "I'm in the Deep End Over You" while declaring his love for Penny. Soon after, Connie discovers that Penny broke her no-email-on-the-honeymoon rule to send one message - written, oddly, while waiting at a police station after the couple missed their flights. It contains a link to a helmet-camera video of the two of them skydiving over Managua, Nicaragua. Wooton, who is terrified of heights, planned the jump himself to conquer his fear, and after Penny helpfully pushes him out of the plane on the count of three, he lands whooping, "I feel like I'm alive!"

The trail turns troubling when Whit calls the London hotel to ask the concierge about the couple's travel plans and learns the hotel has no employee named Pablo. Then Dr. Graham returns with the blood test results: Wooton is perfectly healthy, except that he has been drugged - with a rare experimental medicine, not available to ordinary people, designed to erase memories. The good news is his memories should return within a day or so. The bad news is that someone did this to him on purpose, specifically to make him forget the past few weeks. While Wooton stays behind for more tests, Whit, Jason, and Connie realize that the only way to find Penny is to solve the mystery of who drugged Wooton - and that whoever has access to such a drug may be capable of much worse.