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have left her behind when I returned to the States. But she told me a lot of Mexico was like that. That people were used to it. That there was no way to get away from the drug gangs and she wasn’t afraid of them. She said they would leave her alone so long as she steered clear of them.’
    â€˜That doesn’t sound like the Mexican drug gangs I know,’ Calvano said drily.
    For the first time, Danny Gallagher almost lost his temper. ‘I know what you’re thinking, that she had a boyfriend in a gang or something like that. But she just said she had a friend who would make sure that she was safe and I believed her.’
    Arcelia had clearly believed it, too, but the scars I had seen on her body told me that either she had been mistaken to trust her friend, or that friend had not remained one for long.
    â€˜Then what happened?’ Maggie said. ‘Did she get involved with a gang?’
    The priest intervened, an act of mercy I hoped was designed to give Danny Gallagher some peace and not just an attempt to make sure he didn’t reveal more than the priest wanted him to reveal.
    â€˜A drug gang kidnapped Arcelia about three years ago,’ the priest explained. Danny Gallagher’s eyes were closed. ‘They held her for a few months. We don’t really know why, because she will not speak of that time, but it could be as simple as someone saw how beautiful she was and wanted to use her for a few months.’
    I thought of the scars I had seen criss-crossing her body, of how her tormentors had been careful to maim her only in places where it would not show. Whoever had wanted to use her had been sick. He had wanted to have her beauty, and yet destroy it at the same time.
    â€˜When they grew tired of using her, they went to her family and demanded five thousand dollars for her return,’ the priest said. ‘The family had no money, of course, certainly nothing approaching that sum, and so they contacted Danny.’
    â€˜How did they find you?’ Maggie asked Danny. ‘You said that they did not know of your existence.’
    â€˜I had been frantic,’ he explained. ‘I had not heard from Arcelia in months. She did not reply to my letters and she had stopped showing up for our weekly phone calls at her village’s bodega I went a little crazy when I didn’t hear from her. It had been so real and then, just as suddenly, I felt like a fool. I called the bodega constantly for a few weeks, begging the owner to find her and get her on the phone for me. He kept saying he had not seen her but I did not believe him. I think he told her parents about me, so they knew she’d had a boyfriend from America. After a few months of trying to get her on the phone without luck, I just assumed she had met someone from down there and moved on. But when her parents were trying to find a way to raise the money for her ransom, they went through all of her things and they found the letters from me. Between the letters and what the bodega owner knew about me, they tracked me down here in Delaware.’
    Danny’s voice strengthened with anger as he told Maggie and Calvano the next part. ‘My father refused to give me the money. Can you imagine? He said it was a scam. That Arcelia made her living setting up rich Americans by pretending to love them. He could not believe that what we’d had was real. He could not believe that such a thing actually existed.’
    â€˜So how did you get the money?’ Calvano asked. He was staring at Danny Gallagher thoughtfully, fighting his own prejudices and trying to keep an open mind as Maggie had asked him to do. I was pretty sure Calvano was warming to Danny Gallagher, too. He loved women in all their many forms and, out of all the people in the room, I think Calvano was the one who believed Danny the most when he talked about the love he and his wife had shared. Calvano understood how great Danny’s loss threatened to