Find a Penny

Wooton Bassett has just returned from his honeymoon in a terrible state: his new wife Penny is missing, his phone is gone, and a mysterious drug has wiped out his memory of the past several weeks. Gathered with Whit, Jason, and Connie, Wooton pieces together what little he knows. He woke up groggy near a gate at the Buffalo airport, assumed he had fainted, and rushed home hoping Penny would be there. Jason, suspecting foul play, calls in a favor to get the airport's security footage.

While they wait, a phone message from Penny's parents brings a surprise: Wooton was on the news for saving someone's life at Niagara Falls. The group finds the report online. In it, Wooton modestly explains that he broke the fall of five-year-old Caleb Moore, who tumbled twenty-five feet from a gift shop balcony. Caleb's grateful father, Joel Moore, who runs a helicopter tour company, tells Wooton to call if he ever needs anything at all. The rescue explains why the newlyweds missed their original flight home and had to fly on two separate planes.

The security footage arrives, and it shows a man handing Wooton a cupcake, chatting until Wooton passes out, then slipping the phone from his pocket. FBI facial recognition identifies the man as Seymour Plotner, a low-level crook working for a crime ring called the Victimizers. Agent Martin comes to Odyssey in person to explain: the Victimizers are suspected of stealing the Burke Cent, essentially the first penny ever made, from a Chicago museum. Only ten were minted, and this one is priceless. The thieves scattered to different countries, agents searched them all, and the coin was never found. The FBI believes it was planted on Wooton during his travels.

Looking through photos of known Victimizers, Wooton recognizes two faces from his slowly returning memories: Ernest, who posed as a bellboy at the hotel in Paris, and Francine, the sweet lady on the airplane who knitted Penny a hat. Whit puts it together in a flash: the coin could have been knitted right into that hat so it would never be found if Francine were searched. That means the criminals were never after Wooton at all. Drugging him just got him out of the way. The person they are really hunting is Penny.

Now the race is on to figure out where Penny flew next. Listing the honeymoon stops, Wooton realizes the trip to London was really a trip to England, and the pattern appears: Paris, England, Nicaragua, Niagara Falls. The first letters spell P-E-N-N. Wooton had secretly planned the whole honeymoon to spell out his wife's name, and the final stop must begin with Y. After running through Yemen, Yosemite, and Yellowstone, they land on Youngstown, home of a museum from Wooton's favorite Drake comic books, a postage stamp museum that looks like it is wearing a red hat. Connie remembers Penny's voice message mentioned exactly such a museum. Jason and Whit rush to catch a flight, ordering Wooton to stay behind under a doctor's care, even though he keeps protesting, "It's my penny."

In Youngstown, a forwarded voice message from Penny turns chilling: she has spotted Ernest, she is sure she is being followed by men with guns, and she is thinking of "going under" when someone knocks at her door. At the Miramont Resort, Agent Vicks finds Penny's room ransacked, then chases a decoy rappelling off the balcony with a yellow hat. Meanwhile Whit and Jason's taxi driver turns around with a gun. It is Ernest himself, who sneers, "Retirement has made you rusty, Whittaker." The hat was a fake to distract the agents, and Ernest marches Whit and Jason into the enormous pool complex as bait to draw Penny out.

Whit and Jason quietly puzzle over what "going under" meant, and then it hits them: underwater. Penny surfaces nearby in scuba gear, having hidden beneath the pool for over an hour. When Ernest catches her, she boldly refuses to cooperate, calling his gang "a bunch of yellow-hat-loving chicken bullies." Just as Ernest orders her out of the water, a helicopter roars overhead. It is Wooton, who left the hospital without finishing his applesauce and called in his favor from Mr. Moore. He bellows, "Back away from that cute girl in scuba gear!" As the Victimizers scatter, they run straight into Agent Vicks and her team, who caught the decoy, discovered the fake hat, and doubled back just in time.

With the criminals arrested, everyone braces to break the incredible news to Penny, but she calmly announces she already knows about the coin in her hat. The metal detector in Paris going off over a yarn hat made her suspicious, so the night before she unraveled the hat and found the coin, now safely tucked in her wetsuit, because "Everything is better with pockets!" She hands it over to Agent Vicks. There is just one problem: Penny is convinced Wooton staged the entire mystery as a romantic pretend adventure like the ones in his Drake comics. When she learns the criminals, guns, drugs, and danger were all completely real, she nearly needs to sit down twice. The reunited couple celebrates anyway, and Wooton is left slightly embarrassed to discover that while he was unconscious, his friends guessed his phone password on the first try Connie suggested: Penny and Wooton forever.