How to recover deleted songs from iTunes hard drive (not iPod)

I have a Western Digital hard drive that I use to play all of my mp3 files. Tonight I was creating a playlist by dragging and dropping songs. Although I thought I was editing the playlist, it turns out that I accidently deleted a song from my library ("MUSIC").
Now anytime that I delete something from the external hard drive, it ends up in the recycling bin on my desktop. But that does not seem to be the case with songs that I delete from the "MUSIC" library on my hard drive.
I'm confused. When I accidently deleted this song, where did it go? The folder containing the mp3 file is gone, it is no longer in iTunes and it never appeared in the Recycling Bin. In the past whenever I've accidently deleted a song, I simply went to the Recycling Bin and clicked on "Restore File".
Does anyone know where to find the missing file(s) and how to restore them to my 'MUSIC' folder in iTunes?
Note that this has nothing to do with my iPod, but rather the external hard drive associated with my PC.
Thanking everyone in advance who can help!
Chad

How I wish it were that simple.
My Recycling Bin is empty, which is what is perplexing. Just to see if this function was working properly I deleted a song from the LIBRARY and guess what? It appeared in the Recycling Bin.
Its a mystery what has happened to these songs.
This has happened on several occassions. I waited years for a few rare songs to come out in digital because only vinyl copies existed. When Apple finally reached a licensing agreement to sell these songs, I downloaded them and created a playlist. Somehow the playlist disappeared including all of the songs from the library. I didn't think anything of it because I thought that I could simply go to iTunes, select PURCHASED songs and add them. To my suprise iTunes does not have a history of my purchase.
Finally, after much trouble back and forth with Apple customer support they sent me a link for two of the most recent songs that I downloaded, but the ones that I downloaded a year or more in the past.
The whole entire scenario has left me scratching my head.

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