The Prodigal Twin

Wooton and Penny Bassett are in their garage getting ready to take Wooton's Sunday school class fishing when Penny's phone buzzes. It is Wooton's mother, asking which weekend works best for a family get-together she is planning at the Bassetts' summer cabin - Wooton, Penny, and both of his parents. Wooton would rather not talk about it at all, since his history with his father has been, as he puts it, "a series of nuclear meltdowns punctuated by emotional trauma." Penny gently suggests he simply talk to his dad, but before they can settle anything, his mother calls - and it is his father, Mr. Bassett, on her phone. He is looking for Wooton's identical twin brother, Wellington, who never went home after leaving his office on Friday. No one has seen him since. Wellington is missing.

Wooton hops a plane to Alaska to help search, much to his father's surprise. At Wellington's company he meets Carl Wagner, Wellington's vice president of finance, who is baffled to learn Wellington even has a twin - Wellington never mentioned it. Wooton declares he is the perfect person to follow his brother's trail, since he has known him longer than anyone alive. "They don't call me Gumshoe Bassett for nothing," he announces, though his father points out that no one calls him that.

In Wellington's office they find his phone, wallet, and keys all left behind; the only thing he took was his ID. Wooton also spots something unexpected in the corner: the cover of a comic book he drew when he was about ten, starring a scuba hero called Aquatic Guy - and the model for Aquatic Guy was Wellington himself. Wooton remembers that same childhood summer, when he discovered Wellington's secret cash stash hidden in the mouth of a singing toy fish, money Wellington kept for "eventualities" and once loaned to Wooton at a whopping seventy percent interest. That memory pays off. Wooton notices the mounted sockeye salmon on the office wall and pops it open, revealing a secret compartment - now empty. Security footage from outside the window shows Wellington on Friday night pulling the old comic book and a very large pile of cash out of the fish. To Mr. Bassett, it looks less like petty cash and more like an escape fund.

The trail leads to a pretzel cart outside, where the vendor greets Wooton like a regular. It turns out Wellington stops by at least once a week, and on Friday night he ordered his usual: an extra-large pretzel with jalapeño nacho cheese. Mr. Bassett refuses to believe his dignified son would eat such a thing, but Wooton reveals a family secret - nacho cheese is what Wellington eats when he is stressed. The vendor adds that Wellington skipped his fancy sports car and boarded the airport shuttle instead. On the shuttle ride, the driver hands them a company brochure for an all-inclusive trip to the Cayman Islands, and Wooton shares another memory: as a boy, Wellington dreamed of becoming a marine archaeologist, exploring shipwrecks with sonar and underwater cameras. Instead he grew up to hunt treasure of a duller kind - financial investments, from behind a desk. Mr. Bassett dismisses all of it as ridiculous stories about a son who was never so juvenile.

At the airport, while his father steps away, Wooton calls Penny, who wonders whether Mr. Bassett is quietly hurting because he did not know Wellington as well as he thought. If things are ever going to get better between Wooton and his dad, she says, he cannot wait for the right moment - he has to make the moment. So Wooton does. He tells his father that growing up as Wellington's twin let him see things their parents never saw, and that even if it stings, those secrets might help them find him. To Wooton's astonishment, his father answers with two words he has never said to him before: "You're right." The brochure clinched it - its fine print advertises exploring local shipwrecks with scuba divers, exactly the dream young Wellington gave up. Wooton is delighted that his father has developed some "dad-stincts."

At the Paradise Air ticket counter, the agent mistakes Wooton for an angry customer who came in waving a fistful of cash, demanding a flight to the Cayman Islands. It was Wellington - but every flight there has been canceled because of a hurricane, and he never bought a ticket anywhere else. Then Wagner calls with alarming news: the police are sending a detective, because this has become a fraud case. Back with Wagner, the Bassetts learn that on Friday afternoon, half of the company's new stock was released early and sold for a dime a share instead of the projected thousand dollars each. The shares were not supposed to be for sale at all, and it appears Wellington sold a huge chunk of the company for about five hundred dollars - most likely to himself. As Wagner grimly observes, that would be a very convenient way to steal four and a half million dollars from his partners. The story ends with Wooton and his father stunned, Wellington still missing, and the mystery far from solved.