THE night before the convicted child killer Joel B. Steinberg was hustled by parole officers into the Fortune Society's castlelike home for ex-offenders on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River in Harlem, the society's executive director, JoAnne Page, had a dream.

It was a bad dream, a real doozy.

''I had an image,'' Ms. Page recalls. ''The image was of being on a surfboard, a very small person in an enormous ocean, and watching a swell on the horizon and knowing this wave was coming. I tried to get a good night's sleep. I knew this was going to hit.''

Ms. Page manages a short laugh, marveling that reality turned out to be worse than the dream. Her job is providing a safe home with services to help people who have served their time for crimes -- even those as despicable as Mr. Steinberg's -- re-enter society. Mr. Steinberg, a former lawyer, spent 16 years in an upstate prison for fatally beating 6-year-old Lisa Steinberg, his illegally adopted daughter. He was released on June 30 after being denied parole five times.

''It's been a wild ride,'' a surprisingly chipper Ms. Page says inside the Fortune Academy, the building on Riverside Drive at 140th Street that her organization operates as temporary quarters for ex-offenders. On this afternoon, the organization's most notorious resident is behind the closed doors of the dining room, off limits to a reporter. Ms. Page, 50, sits in a nearby conference room. Dressed in black, with a fanny pack around her waist, she has a short, compact build and wiry gray hair that looks slightly electrified. She is relaxed and chatty, almost bouncy.